
Class Q KJ.L 

Boole 44 4: 

Copyright N° 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 




Hedge Bindweed [Convolvulus septum). 



THE 



STORY OF THE PLANTS 



BY 



GRANT ALLEN 



WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1902 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

TS*0 Cu«tc RtCfclVED 

NOV. 2V 1902 






OOWr a 



Copyright, 1895, 1902, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



PREFACE. 



In this little volume I have endeavoured to 
give a short and succinct account of the principal 
phenomena of plant life, in language suited to 
the comprehension of unscientific readers. As far 
as possible I have avoided techni-cal terms and 
minute detail, while I have tried to adopt a more 
philosophical tone than is usually employed in 
elementary works. I have treated my readers, 
not as children, but as men and women, endowed 
with the average amount of intelligence and in- 
sight, and anxious to obtain some sensible infor- 
mation about the world of plants which exists all 
round them. Acting upon this basis, I have freely 
admitted the main results of the latest investiga- 
tions, accepting throughout the evolutionary the- 
ory, and making the study of plants a first intro- 
duction to the great modern principles of heredity, 
variation, natural selection, and adaptation to the 
environment. Hence I have wasted compara- 
tively little space on mere structural detail, and 
have dwelt as much as possible on those more in- 
teresting features in the interrelation of the plant 
and animal worlds which have vivified for us of 
late years the dry bones of the old technical 
botany. 

My principle has been to unfold my subject 



6 PREFACE. 

by gradual stages, telling the reader one thing at 
a time, and building up by degrees his knowledge 
of the subject. My treatment is, therefore, to 
some extent diagrammatic, especially in the ear- 
lier chapters; but I endeavour as I proceed to 
correct the generalisations and fill in the gaps of 
the first crude statement. I trust that advanced 
students who may glance at this little book will 
forgive me for such concessions to the weaker 
brethren, especially when they see that at the 
same time I have ventured to lay before untech- 
nical readers all the latest results of the most 
advanced botanical research, as far as could be 
done in so small a compass. I have even made 
bold to speak at times of "carbonic acid," where 
I ought strictly to have said " carbon dioxide," 
and to glide gently over the distinction between 
hydro-carbons and carbo-hydrates, which could 
interest none but chemical students. I have been 
well content to make these trivial sacrifices of 
formal accuracy in order to find room for fuller 
exposition of the delightful relations between 
flowers and insects, birds and fruits, soil and 
plant, climate and foliage. In one word, I have 
dwelt more on the functions and habits of plants 
than on their structure and classification. At the 
same time I have tried to lead on my reader by 
gradual stages to the further study of plants in 
the concrete; and I shall be disappointed if my 
little book does not induce a considerable pro- 
portion of those into whose hands it may fall to 
pursue the subject further in our fields and woods 
by the aid of a Flora. 

G. A. 
The Croft, Hindhead. 
Aptil, 1895. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER 

I. Introductory .... 
II. How Plants began to be 
III. How Plants came to Differ 

Another 

IV. How Plants Eat 
V. How Plants Drink . 
VI. How Plants Marry . 
VII. Various Marriage Customs . 
VIII. More Marriage Customs. 
IX. The Wind as Carrier 
X. How Flowers Club together 
XI. What Plants do for their Young 
XII. The Stem and Branches. 

XIII. Some Plant Biographies 

XIV. The Past History of Plants 



One 



PAGB 

9 
14 

25 
33 

53 
73 
86 

105 
124 

135 
149 
161 
182 
203 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Hedge Bindweed {Convolvulus septum). Frontispiece 
A thin slice from a leaf, seen under the microscope 
Finger-veined leaves .... 

Feather-veined leaves .... 

and 5. Types of lobed and divided leaves . 
Parallel-veined leaves . . « 
8, and 9. Roots of carrot, frogbit, and radish 
Sundew ....... 

An Australian pitcher plant 

Insect-eating pitchers of the Malayan nepenthes 

Male and female flower of a sedge . 

Beginnings of sex in a pond weed 

Flower, with petals removed, showing stamens and 

pistil 

Grains of pollen sending out pollen-tubes 
Flower of a shrubbery plant, Weigelia 
Pin-eyed primrose ..... 
Thrum-eyed primrose .... 
Male and female flowers of arrowhead 

21. Flower of water-plantain .... 

22. Flower of orchid 

23. Pollen-masses of orchid .... 

24. The two pollen-masses, very much enlarged 
2v The common arum, or cuckoo-pint . 

Spike of the cuckoo-pint .... 

Male and female flower of salad-burnet . 

Flowers of bur-reed 

Flowers of hazel ..... 
30 and 31. Mowers of wheat .... 

32. Clusters of flowers 

33 and 34. Florets from the centre of a daisy . 

35. Floret from the ray of a daisy . 

36. Flower-head of a thistle .... 
37> 33, 39, 40, and 41. Forms of fruits 
42, 43, 44, and 45. Floating fruits . 
46, 47, and 48. Adhesive fruits 
49. First steps in the evolution of the stem 



36 

4i 

42 

43 
45 
56 
64 
67 
69 

74 

75 

77 
81 
82 
100 
100 
108 
109 
117 
118 
119 
120 
121 
127 
129 
131 
134 
138 
140 
141 
144 
151 
153 
157 
163 



CHAPTER I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

I propose in this volume to write in brief the 
history of plants, their origin and their develop- 
ment. I shall deal with them all, both big and 
little, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the 
hyssop that springeth out of the wall. I shall 
endeavour to show how they first came into exist- 
ence, and by what slow degrees they have been 
altered and moulded into the immense variety of 
tree, shrub, and herb, palm, mushroom, and sea- 
weed we now behold before us. In short, I shall 
treat the history of plants much as one treats 
the history of a nation, beginning with their sim- 
ple and unobtrusive origin, and tracing them up 
through varying stages to their highest point of 
beauty and efficiency. 

Plants are living things. That is the first idea 
we must clearly form about them. They are liv- 
ing in just the same sense that you and I are. 
They were born from a seed, the joint product of 
two previous individuals, their father and mother. 
Plants likewise live by eating; they have mouths 
and stomachs, which devour, digest, and assimi- 
late the food supplied to them. These mouths 
and stomachs exist in the shape of leaves, whose 
business it is to catch floating particles of car- 
bonic acid in the air around, to suck such par- 
ticles in by means of countless lips, and to extract 

9 



IO THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

from them the carbon which is the principal food 
and raw material of plant life. Plants also drink, 
but, unlike ourselves, they have quite different 
mouths to eat with and to drink with. They take 
in their more solid constituent, carbon, with their 
leaves from the air ; but they take in their liquid 
constituent, water, with their roots and rootlets 
from the soil beneath them. " More solid," I say, 
because the greater part of the wood and harder 
tissues of plants is made up of carbon, in com- 
bination with other less important materials ; 
though, when the plants eat this carbon, it is not 
in the solid form, but in the shape of a gas, car- 
bonic acid, as I shall more fully explain when 
we come to consider this subject in detail. For 
the present, it will be enough to remember that 
Plants are living things, which eat and drink exactly 
as we ourselves do. 

Plants also marry and rear families. They 
have two distinct sexes, male and female — some- 
times separated on different plants, but more 
often united on the same stem, or even combined 
in the same flower. For flowers are the reproduc- 
tive parts of plants; they are there for the pur- 
pose of producing the seeds, from which new 
plants spring, and by means of which each kind 
is perpetuated. The male portions of plants of 
the higher types are known as stamens; they shed 
a yellow powder which we call pollen, and this 
powder has a fertilising influence on the y.oung 
seeds or ovules. The female portion of plants of 
the higher types is known as the pistil; it con- 
tains tiny undeveloped knobs or ovules, which 
can only swell out and grow into fruitful seeds 
provided they have been fertilised by pollen from 
the stamens of their own or some other flower. 



INTRODUCTORY. II 

The ovules thus answer very closely to the eggs 
of animals. After they have been fertilised, the 
pistil begins to mature into what we call a fruit, 
which is sometimes a sweet and juicy berry, as in 
the grape or the currant, but more often a dry 
capsule, as in the poppy or the violet. 

Plants, however, unlike animals, are usually 
fixed and rooted to one spot. This makes it 
practically impossible for them to go in search 
of mates, like birds or butterflies, squirrels or 
weasels. So they are obliged to depend upon 
outside agencies, not themselves, for the convey- 
ance of pollen from one flower to another. Some- 
times, in particular plants, such as the hazels and 
grasses, it is the wind that carries the pollen on 
its wings from one blossom to its neighbour; and, 
in this case, the stamens which shed the pollen 
hang out freely to the breeze, while the pistil, 
which is to catch it, is provided with numberless 
little feathery tails to receive the passing grains 
of fertilising powder. But oftener still, it is in- 
sects that perform this kind office for the plant, 
as in the dog-rose, the hollyhock, and the greater 
part of our beautiful garden flowers. In such 
cases the plant usually makes its blossom very 
attractive with bright-coloured petals, so as to 
allure the insect, while it repays him for his 
trouble in carrying away the pollen by giving him 
in return a drop of honey. The bee or butterfly 
goes there, of course, for the honey alone, un- 
conscious that he is aiding the plant to set its 
seeds ; but the plant puts the honey there in 
order to entice him against his will to transport 
the fertilising powder from flower to flower. 
There is no more fascinating chapter in the great 
book of life than that which deals with these mar- 



12 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

riage relations of the flowers and insects, and I 
shall explain at some detail in later portions of 
this little work some of the most curious and in- 
teresting of such devices. 

Again, after the plant has had its flower ferti- 
lised, and has set its seed, it has to place its young 
ones out in the world to the greatest advantage. 
If it merely drops them under its own branches, 
they may not thrive at all ; it may have im- 
poverished the soil already of certain things 
which are necessary for that particular kind, ow- 
ing to causes to be explained hereafter; and even 
where this is not the case, the surrounding soil 
may be so fully occupied by other plants that the 
poor little seedlings get no chance of establishing 
themselves. To meet such emergencies, plants 
have invented all sorts of clever dodges for dis- 
persing their seeds, into the nature of which we 
will go in full in the sequel. Thus, some of them 
put feathery tops to their seeds or fruits, like the 
thistle and the dandelion, the willow and the 
cotton-bush, by means of which they float lightly 
on the air, and are wafted by the wind to new 
and favourable situations. Others, again, bribe 
animals to disperse them, by the allurement of 
sweet and pulpy fruits, like the strawberry or the 
orange; and in all these instances, though the 
fruit or outer coat is edible, the actual seed itself 
is hard and indigestible, like the orange-pip, or 
is covered with a solid envelope like the cherry- 
stone. Numerous other examples we shall see 
by and by in their proper place. For the present, 
we have only to remember that plants to some 
extent provide beforehand for their children, and 
in many cases take care to set them out in life to 
the best possible advantage. 



INTRODUCTORY. 1 3 

Most of these points to which I am here 
briefly calling your attention are true only of the 
higher plants, and especially of land-plants. For 
we must not forget that plants, like animals, differ 
immensely from one another in dignity, rank, and 
relative development. There are higher and 
lower orders. We shall have to consider, there- 
fore, their grades and classes — to find out why 
some are big, some small ; some annual, some 
perennial ; why some are rooted in dry land, while 
some float freely about in water ; why some have 
soft stems like spinach and celery, while others 
have hard trunks like the oak and the chestnut. 
We shall also have to ask ourselves what were 
the causes which made them differ at first from 
one another, and to what agencies they owe the 
various steps in their upward development. In 
short, we must not rest content with merely say- 
ing that the rose is like this and the cabbage like 
that ; we must try to find out what gave to each 
of them its main distinctive features. We must 
"consider the lilies, how they grow," and must 
seek to account for their growth and their pecul- 
iarities. 

And now let me sum up again these central 
ideas of our future reading on plants and their 
history. 

Plants are living things ; they eat with their 
leaves, and drink with their rootlets. They take 
up carbon from the air, and water from the soil, 
and build the materials so derived into their own 
bodies. Plants also marry and are given in mar- 
riage. They have often two sexes, male and 
female. Each seed is thus the product of a) 
separate father and mother. Plants are of many 
kinds, and we must inquire by and by how they 



14 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

came to be so. Plants live on sea and land, and 
have varieties specially fitted for almost every 
situation. Plants have very varied ways of secur- 
ing the fertilisation of their flowers, and look 
after the future of their young, like good parents 
that they are, in many different manners. Plants 
are higher and lower, exactly like animals. 

These are some of the points we must proceed 
to consider at greater length in the following 
pages. 



CHAPTER II. 

HOW PLANTS BEGAN TO BE. 

Which came first — the plant or the animal ? 

That question is almost as absurd as if one 
were to ask, Which came first — the beast of prey, 
or the animals it preys upon ? Clearly, the ear- 
liest animals could not possibly have been lions 
and tigers; for lions and tigers could not begin 
to exist till after there were deer and antelopes 
for them to hunt and devour. Now the general con- 
nection between animals and plants is somewhat 
the same in this respect as the general connection 
between beasts of prey and the creatures they 
feed upon. For all animals feed, directly or in- 
directly, upon plants and their products. Even 
carnivorous animals eat sheep and rabbits, let us 
say ; but then, the sheep and the rabbits eat grass 
and clover. In the last resort, plants are self- 
supporting ; animals feed upon what the plants 
have laid by for their own uses. Every animal 
gets all its material (except water) directly or in- 
directly from plants. In one word, J>/ants are the 



HOW PLANTS BEGAN TO BE. 15 

only things that know how to manufacture living ma- 
terial. 

Roughly speaking, plants are the producers 
and animals the consumers. Plants are like the 
pine-tree that makes the wood ; animals are like 
the fire that burns it up and reduces it to its pre- 
vious unorganised condition. 

It is a little difficult really to understand the 
true relation of plants and animals without some 
small mental effort ; yet the point is so important, 
and will help us so much in our after inquiries, 
that I will venture upon asking you to make that 
effort, here at the very outset. 

If you take a piece of wood or coal, you have 
in it a quantity of hydrogen and carbon, almost 
unmixed with oxygen, or at least combined with 
far less oxygen than they are capable of uniting 
with. Now put a light to the wood or coal, and 
what happens ? They catch fire, as we say, and 
burn till they are consumed. And what is the 
meaning of this burning? Why, the carbon and 
hydrogen are rushing together with oxygen — 
taking up all the oxygen they can unite with, and 
forming with it carbonic acid and water. The 
carbon joins the oxygen in a very close embrace, 
and becomes carbonic acid gas, which goes up the 
chimney and mixes with the atmosphere; the 
hydrogen joins the oxygen in an equally intimate 
union, and similarly goes off into the air in the 
form of steam or watery vapour. Burning, in 
fact, is nothing more than the union of the carbon 
and hydrogen in wood or coal with the oxygen of 
the atmosphere. But observe that, as the carbon 
and hydrogen burn, they give off light and heat. 
This light and heat they held stored up before in 
their separate form ; it was, so to speak, dormant 



1 6 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

or latent within them. Free carbon and free 
hydrogen contain an amount of energy, that is to 
say of latent light and dormant heat, which they 
yield up when they unite with free oxygen. And 
though the carbon and hydrogen in wood and coal 
are not quite free, they may be regarded as free 
for our present purpose. 

Now, where did this light and heat come from ? 
Well, the wood, we know, is part of a tree which 
has grown in the open air, by the aid of sunshine. 
The coal is just equally part of certain very 
ancient plants, long pressed beneath the earth 
and crushed and hardened, but still possessing 
the plant-like property of burning when lighted. 
In both cases the light and heat, as we shall see 
more fully hereafter, are derived from the sun, 
our great storehouse of energy. The sunshine 
fell upon the leaves of the modern oak-tree, or of 
the very antique club-mosses which constitute 
coal, and separated in them the carbon from the 
oxygen of carbonic acid, and the hydrogen from 
the oxygen of the water in the sap. In each case 
the oxygen was turned loose upon the air in its 
free form, while the carbon and the hydrogen 
(with a very little oxygen and a few other ma- 
terials) were left in loose and almost free condi- 
tions in the leaves and wood of the oak or the club- 
moss. But the point to which I wish now specially 
to direct your attention is this — the. sunlight was 
actually used up for the time being in effecting 
this separation between the oxygen on the one 
hand, and the carbon and hydrogen on the other. 
As long as the plant remained unburnt, the light 
and heat it received from the sun lay dormant 
within it, not as actual light and heat, but as sepa- 
ration between the oxygen and the hydrogen or 



HOW PLANTS BEGAN TO BE. 17 

carbon. Coal, indeed, has been well described as 
" bottled sunshine." 

More than this; it took just as much light and 
heat from the sun to build up the plant as you 
can get out of the plant in the end by burning it. 

Now, let us burn our pieces of wood or coal, 
and what happens ? Why, particles of oxygen 
rush together with particles of carbon in the fuel, 
and form carbonic acid. How much carbonic 
acid ? Just as much as it took originally to build 
that part of the plant from. Simultaneously, 
other particles of oxygen in the air rush together 
with particles of hydrogen in the fuel, and form 
water, in the shape of steam. How much water ? 
Just as much as it took originally to build that 
part of the plant from. As they unite, they give 
out their dormant heat and light. How much 
heat and light? Just as much as they absorbed 
in the act of building up those parts of the plant 
from the sunshine that fell upon them. 

In other words, the same quantity of oxygen 
that was first separated from the carbon and hy- 
drogen reunites with them in the act of burning, 
and the same amount of heat and light that were 
required to effect their separation is yielded up 
again in the act of reunion. 

Let us put this point numerically, and I will 
simplify it exceedingly, so as to make my meaning 
clearer. Suppose we begin with a particle of 
carbonic acid and a particle of water in the inte- 
rior of a green leaf — the carbonic acid swallowed 
from the air by the leaf, the water brought to it 
as sap from the roots. Now, under the influence 
of sunlight, these materials are separated into 
their component parts. The particle of carbonic 
acid consists of one atom of carbon, closely locked 
2 



1 8 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

up with two atoms of oxygen. It takes an amount 
of sunlight, which we will call A, to unlock this 
union, and separate the atoms. The oxygen goes 
off free into the air, and the carbon remains in the 
leaf as material for building the plant up. Again, 
the particle of water consists of two atoms of 
hydrogen, closely locked up with one atom of 
oxygen. It takes an amount of sunlight, which 
we will call B, to unlock this union and separate 
the atoms. The oxygen once more goes off free 
into the air, and the hydrogen joins in a loose 
union with the carbon already spoken of. Now, 
burn the materials resulting from these two acts, 
and what happens ? Two atoms of oxygen once 
more unite with the one atom of carbon, to form 
a particle of carbonic acid ; one atom of oxygen 
once more unites with the two atoms of hydrogen 
to form a particle of water, and there is given out 
in the act of union an amount of light and heat 
exactly equal to the A and B originally locked up 
in the act of separating them. 

I have now made it clear, I hope, what plant 
life really is in its final essence. In nature at 
large, the elements which chiefly compose it — 
namely, carbon and hydrogen — exist only in very 
close union with oxygen ; the plant is a machine 
for separating these elements from oxygen under 
the influence of sunlight, and building them up 
into fresh forms, whose great peculiarity is that 
they possess energy or dormant motion. 

Now the animal is the exact opposite of all 
this. He is essentially a destroyer, as the plant 
is a builder. The plant produces; the animal 
consumes; the plant makes living matter, the 
animal breaks it down again. He is, in fact, a 
slow fire, where plant products like grasses, fruits, 



HOW PLANTS BEGAN TO BE. 19 

nuts, or grains, are consumed by degrees and re- 
duced once more to their original condition. 

The animal eats what the plant laid by. He 
also breathes — that is to say, takes oxygen into 
his lungs. Within his body that oxygen once 
more unites with the carbon and the hydrogen, 
and is given out again in union with them as 
carbonic acid and water. And the energy in the 
plant food, thus set free within his body, takes 
the form of animal heat and animal motion — just 
as the energy set free in the locomotive takes 
the form of heat and visible movement. Animals 
are thus the absolute converse of plants; all that 
the plants did, the animal undoes again. 

Briefly to recapitulate this rather dry subject, 
— the plant is a mechanism for separating oxygen 
from carbon and hydrogen, and for storing up 
sun-energy. The animal is a mechanism for 
uniting oxygen with carbon and hydrogen, and 
for using the stored-up sun-energy as heat and 
motion. 

And now you can see why it is so absurd to 
ask, Which came first, the plant or the animal ? 
You might as well ask, Which came first, the coal 
or the fire ? All the living material in the world 
was first made and laid up by plants. They alone^ 
have the power to make living or energy-yielding 
stuff out of dead and inert water or carbonic acid. 
They are the origin and foundation of life. With- 
out them there could be no living thing in the 
universe. It is in their green parts alone that 
the wonderful transformation of dead matter into 
living bodies takes place; they alone know how 
to store up and utilise the sunshine that falls 
upon them. All the animal can do is to take the 



20 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

living material the plant has made for him, and 
to consume it slowly in his own body. He de- 
stroys it (as living matter) just as truly as a fire 
does, and turns it loose on the air again in the 
dead and inert forms of water and carbonic acid. 
It is clear, then, that plants must have come 
first, and animals afterward. The earliest living 
beings must needs have been plants — very simple 
plants ; yet essentially plants in this — that they 
were green, and that they separated carbon and 
hydrogen from oxygen under the influence of 
sunlight. It is that above everything that makes 
true plants ; though some degenerate plants have 
now given up their ancestral habit, and behave in 
this respect much like animals. 

How did the first plant of all come into 
being ? 

About that, at present, we know very little. 
We can only guess that, in the early ages of the 
world, when matter was fresher and more plastic 
than now, certain combinations were set up be- 
tween atoms under the influence of sunlight, 
which formed the earliest living body. This 
would be what is called "spontaneous genera- 
tion." Whether such spontaneous generation 
ever took place is much disputed ; though some 
people competent to form an opinion incline to 
believe that it probably did take place-in remote 
times and under special conditions. But it is 
certain, or almost certain, that in our own days 
at least spontaneous generation does not take 
place — perhaps because all the available material 
is otherwise employed, perhaps because the con- 
ditions are no longer favourable. At any rate, 
we have every reason to suppose that at the 



HOW PLANTS BEGAN TO BE. 21 

present day every living being, whether plant or 
animal, is the product of a previous living being, 
its parent, or of two previous living beings, its 
father and mother. 

Why should this be so? Well, if you think 
for a moment, you will see that it results almost 
naturally from the other facts we have so far 
considered. For the plant is a machine for mak- 
ing living matter out of water and carbonic acid, 
under the influence of sunlight. As long as sun- 
light, direct or reflected, in sun or shade, falls 
upon a green plant, the plant goes on taking up 
carbonic acid from the air by means of its leaves, 
and water from the earth by means of its roots, 
and continues to manufacture from them fresh 
living material. Thus it must be always growing, 
as we say ; in other words, the mass of living 
material must be constantly increasing. Now, it 
results from this that the plant would grow in 
time unwieldily large ; and in simple types, when 
it grows very large, it splits or divides into two 
portions. That is the real origin of what we call 
reproduction. In its simplest forms, reproduc- 
tion means no more than this — that a rather 
large body, which cannot easily hold together, 
divides in two, and that each part of it then con- 
tinues to live and grow exactly as the whole did. 

This seems odd and unfamiliar to you, because 
you are thinking of large and very advanced 
plants, like a sweet-pea or a potato. But you 
must remember that we are dealing here with 
very early and simple plants, and that these early 
and simple plants consist for the most part of 
tiny green mites, floating free in water. They 
are generally invisible to the naked eye, and are 
in point of fact mere specks of green jelly. Yet 



2 2 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

it is from such insignificant atoms as these that 
the great forest trees derive their origin, through 
a long line of ancestors; and if we wish to under- 
stand the larger and more developed plants, we 
must begin by understanding these their simple 
relations. 

Very early plants, then, floated free in water; 
and there is reason to believe that for a consider- 
able period in the beginnings of our world there 
was no dry land at all ; the whole surface of the 
globe was covered by one boundless ocean. At 
any rate, most of the simplest and earliest forms 
of life now remaining to us inhabit the water, 
either fresh or salt; while almost all the higher 
and nobler plants and animals are dwellers on 
land. Hence it is not unreasonable to conclude 
that life began in the sea, and only gradually spread 
itself over the islands and continents. 

Floating jelly-like plants would readily reach 
a size at which it would be convenient for them 
to split in two — or rather, at which it would be 
difficult for them to hold together ; and most very 
small floating plants do to this day continue to 
grow, up to a certain point, and then divide into 
two similar and equal portions. This is the sim- 
plest known form of what we call reproduction. 
Of course, the two halves into, which the plant 
thus divides itself are exactly like one another; 
and that gives us the basis for what we call he- 
redity — that is to say, the general similarity 
between parent and offspring. This similarity de- 
pends upon the fact that the two were once one, 
and when they split or divide each part continues 
to possess all the qualities of the original mass of 
which it once formed a portion. 

You will observe that I here use the words, 



HOW PLANTS BEGAN TO BE. 23 

parent and offspring. I do so, partly from cus- 
tom, and partly to show where this reasoning leads 
us. But in reality, in such very simple plants, 
neither part of the divided whole can claim to be 
either parent or child ; they are equal and similar. 
In higher plants, however (as in higher animals), 
we find that the main portion of the plant con- 
tinues to live and grow, and sends off smaller por- 
tions, known as spores or seeds, to reproduce its 
species. Here, we may fairly speak of the larger 
plant as the parent, and of the smaller ones which 
it detaches from itself as its children or offspring. 

The truth is, every gradation exists in nature 
between these two extreme cases. The different 
types glide imperceptibly into one another. There 
is no one point at which we can definitely say, 
" Here reproduction by splitting or division ceases, 
and reproduction by eggs, or by spores or seeds 
begins." 

Again, all the earlier and simpler plants are 
sexless; they simply grow till they divide, and 
then the two halves continue to exist independ- 
ently. No two distinct plants or parts of plants 
are concerned in producing each new individual. 
But the higher plants, like the higher animals, 
are male and female. In such cases two distinct 
individuals combine to form a new one. They 
are its father and mother, so to speak, and the 
young one is their offspring. A little grain of 
pollen produced by the male plant unites with a 
little ovule or seedlet produced by the female; 
and from the union of the two springs a fresh 
young plant, deriving its peculiarities about equal- 
ly from each of them. How and why this great 
change in the mode of reproduction takes place 
is another of the questions we must discuss here- 



24 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

after ; I will only anticipate now the result of 
this discussion by saying briefly beforehand that 
plants gain in this way, because greater variety is 
secured in the offspring, and because the weak 
points of one parent are likely to be reinforced 
and made good by the other. 

Let us sum up our conclusions in this pre- 
liminary chapter : — 

Plants are an older type of life than animals. 
They are the first and most original form of liv- 
ing beings, and without them no life of any sort 
would be possible. All living matter is manufac- 
tured by plants out of material found floating in 
the air, under the influence of sunlight. How 
plants first came into existence we do not yet 
know ; but we may suspect that they grew, in very 
simple and small forms, at a remote period, under 
conditions which now no longer exist. It is al- 
most certain that the first plants were jelly-like 
specks, floating freely in water. They must have 
been green, and must also have possessed the 
essential plant-power of building up fresh living 
material when sunlight fell upon them. This pow- 
er implies the other power of reproduction, that is 
to say of splitting up into two or more similar 
parts, each of which continues to live and grow 
like the original body. From such simple and 
very primordial plants all other and higher forms 
are most likely descended. 



HOW PLANTS CAME TO DIFFER. 25 



CHAPTER III. 

HOW PLANTS CAME TO DIFFER FROM ONE 
ANOTHER. 

All plants are not now alike. Some are trees, 
some herbs; some are roses, some buttercups. 
Yet we have a certain amount of reason to believe 
that they are all descended from one and the 
same original ancestor ; and we shall see by and 
by that we can often trace the various stages in 
their long development. They differ immensely. 
Some of them are more advanced and more com- 
plex than their neighbours; some are small and 
low, while others are tall and strong; some, like 
nettles and grasses, have simple and inconspicu- 
ous flowers, while others, like lilies and orchids, 
have beautiful and very complicated blossoms, 
highly arranged in such ways as to attract and 
entice particular insects to visit and fertilise them. 
Again, some have tiny dry fruits, with small round 
seeds, which fall on the ground unheeded ; while 
others have brilliant red or yellow berries, or 
winged or feathery seeds, especially fitted for spe- 
cial modes of dispersion. In short, there are 
plants which seem, as it were, very low and un- 
civilised, while there are others which display, so 
to speak, all the latest modern "inventions and 
improvements. 

The question is, How did they thus come to 
differ from one another ? What made them vary 
in such diverse ways from the primitive pattern ? 

In order to understand the answer which 
modern science gives to this question, we must 
first glance briefly at certain early steps in the 



26 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

history of the process which we call creation or 
evolution. 

The earliest plants, we saw, were in all prob- 
ability mere tiny green jelly-specks, floating free 
in water, and taking from it small quantities of 
dissolved carbonic acid, which they manufactured 
for themselves into green living material when 
sunlight fell upon them. Now we shall have to 
consider another peculiarity of plants (and of 
animals as well before we can thoroughly under- 
stand the first stage in the upward process which 
leads at last to the pine and the lily, the palm 
and the apple. 

Plants are made up of separate parts or ele- 
ments, known as cells, each of which consists of a 
thin cell-wall, usually containing living material. 
The very simplest and earliest plants, however, 
consist of a single such cell apiece; they are 
specks of green jelly, enclosed by a cell-wall, 
alone and isolated. In such cases, when the cell 
grows big and divides in two, each half floats off 
as a separate cell, or a separate plant, and con- 
tinues to divide again and again, as long as it can 
get a sufficient amount of carbonic acid and sun- 
light. But in some instances it happens that the 
new cells, when budded out from the old ones, do 
not float off in water, but remain hanging to- 
gether in long strings or threads, in single file, as 
you may see in certain simple forms of hair-like 
pond-weeds. These weeds consist of rows of 
cells, stuck one after another, not unlike rows of 
pearls in a necklace. Of course the individual 
cells are too small to see with one's unaided eye ; 
but under a microscope you can see them, joined 
end to end, so as to form a sort of thread or long 



HOW PLANTS CAME TO DIFFER. 27 

line of plant-cells. This is the beginning of the 
formation of the higher plants, which consist, in- 
deed, of collections of cells, arranged either in 
rows or in flattened blades, or many deep together 
in complicated order. 

However, the higher plants differ from the 
lower ones in something more than the number 
and complexity of the cells which compose them. 
They are very varied ; and their variety adapts 
them to their special circumstances. For example, 
desert plants, like the cactuses, have thick and 
fleshy leaves (or, rather, jointed stems) to store 
up water, with a very tough skin to prevent 
evaporation. The flowers of each country, again, 
are exactly adapted to the insects of that coun- 
try ; and so are the fruits to the birds that swal- 
low and disperse them. How did this all come 
about ? What made the adaptation ? It is a re- 
sult of two great underlying principles known as 
The Struggle for Life, and Natural Selection. 

Since each early plant goes on growing and 
dividing, again and again, as fast as it can, it 
must follow in time that a great number of plants 
will soon be produced, each fighting with the 
others for air and sunlight. Now, some of them 
must, by pure accident of situation, get better 
placed than others; and these will produce greater 
numbers of descendants. Again, unless all of 
them remained utterly uninfluenced by circum- 
stances (which is not likely) it must necessarily 
happen that slight differences will come to exist 
between them. These differences of outline, or 
shape, or cell-wall, may happen to make it easier 
or harder for the plant to get access to carbonic 
acid and sunlight, or to disperse its young, or to 
fix itself favourably. Those plants, therefore, 



28 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

which happened to vary in the right directions 
would most easily go on living and produce most 
descendants, while those which happened to vary 
in the wrong directions would soonest die out and 
leave fewest descendants. 

Well, the world around us, both of plants and 
animals, is full of creatures all struggling against 
one another, and all competing for food and air 
and sunshine. Moreover, each individual pro- 
duces (as a rule) a vast number of young; some- 
times, like the poppy, many thousand seeds on a 
single flower-stem. Now suppose only ten of 
those seeds succeed in growing each year. In the 
first year, that poppy will have produced ten new 
poppy plants; the year after, each of those ten 
will have produced ten more, making the total 
ioo; in the third year, they will be 1,000; in the 
fourth, 10,000; and so on in the same progression 
till in a very few years the whole world would 
simply be full of poppies. And similarly with 
animals. If every egg in a cod's roe developed 
into a mature fish, the sea would soon be one solid 
and compact mass of cod-fish. 

Why doesn't this happen? Because every 
other kind is producing seeds or eggs at about 
the same rate, and every one of them is fighting 
against the other for its share of light and food 
and soil and water. The stronger or better- 
adapted survive, while the weaker or less-adapted 
go to the wall, and are starved out of existence. 
At first, to be sure, it sounds odd to talk of a 
Struggle for Life among plants, which seem too 
fixed and inert to battle against one another. But 
they do battle for all that. Each root is striving 
with all its might to fix itself underground in the 
best position ; each leaf and stem is struggling 



HOW PLANTS CAME TO DIFFER. 29 

hard to overtop its neighbour, and secure its fair 
share of carbon and of sunshine. When a garden 
is abandoned, you can very soon see the result of 
this struggle ; for the flowers, which we only keep 
alive by weeding — that is to say, by uprooting 
the sturdier competitors — are soon overgrown 
and killed out by the weeds — that is to say, by 
the stronger and better-adapted native plants of 
the district. 

This, then, is the nature and meaning of these 
two great principles. The Struggle for Life means 
that more creatures are produced than there is 
room in the world for. Natural Selection (or Sur- 
vival of the Fittest) means that among them all 
those which happen to be best adapted to their 
particular circumstances oftenest succeed and 
leave most offspring. 

By the action of the two great principles in 
question (which affect all life, animal or vegeta- 
ble) the world has been gradually filled with an 
immense variety of wonderful and beautiful crea- 
tures, all ultimately descended (as modern thinkers 
hold) from the selfsame ancestors. The simple 
little green jelly-speck, which is the primitive 
plant, has given rise in time to the sea-weeds and 
liverworts, then to the mosses and ferns, then to 
the simplest flowering plants, thence to the shrubs 
and trees, and finally to all the immense wealth 
and variety of fruits, flowers, and foliage we now 
see around us. 

The rest of this book will consist mainly of an 
exposition of the results brought about among 
plants by Variation, the Struggle for Life, and 
Survival of the Fittest. But before we go on to 
examine them in detail, I shall give just a few 



30 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

characteristic instances which show the mode of 
action of these important principles. 

There is a pretty wild flower in our hedges 
called a red campion, or " Robin Hood." Now, 
a single red campion produces in a year three 
thousand seeds. But there are not three thou- 
sand times as many red campions this year as 
last, nor will there be three thousand times as 
many more again next season. Indeed, if an 
annual plant had only two seeds, each of which 
lived and produced two more, and so on contin- 
ually, in twenty years its descendants would 
amount to no less than a million. From all this 
it necessarily results that a Struggle for Existence 
must take place among plants; they fight with 
one another for the soil, the rain, the carbon, the 
sunshine. 

Again, take such a wild flower as this very red 
campion. Why has it light pink petals? The 
reason is, to attract the insects which fertilise it. 
Flowers, in which the pollen is carried by the 
wind, never have brilliant or conspicuous blossoms ; 
but flowers which are fertilised by insects have 
almost always coloured petals to tell the insects 
where to find the honey. How did this come 
about? In this way, I imagine: Many plants 
produce a sweet juice on their leaves — for exam- 
ple, the common laurel. This juice, which is 
probably of no particular use to them, is very 
greedily eaten by insects. Now suppose some 
flower, by accident at first, happened to produce 
such sweet juice near its stamens, which (as we 
saw) are the organs for making pollen, and also 
near its pistil, which contains its young seeds or 
ovules. Then insects would naturally visit it to 
eat this sweet juice, which we commonly call 



HOW PLANTS CAME TO DIFFER. 31 

honey. In eating it, they would dust themselves 
over with the floury pollen, by pure accident, and 
they would carry some of it away with them on 
their heads and legs to the next flower they 
visited. Chance would make them often rub off 
the pollen and fertilise the flower ; and as such 
cross-fertilisation, as it is called, is good for the 
plants, producing very strong and vigorous seed- 
lings, the young ones so set would have the best 
chance of flourishing and surviving in the Struggle 
for Existence. Thus the flowers which made most 
honey would be oftenest visited and crossed, so 
that they would soon become very numerous. 
Again, if they happened to have bright leaves 
near the honey, they would be most readily dis- 
criminated, and oftenest visited. So, in the long 
run, it has come about that almost all the flowers 
fertilised by insects produce honey to allure them, 
and have brilliant petals to guide their allies to 
the honey. That, in fact, is what beautiful flowers 
are for — to attract the fertilising bees and butter- 
flies to visit and impregnate the various blossoms. 
Take one more case — or, rather, the same 
case, extended a little further. The red cam- 
pion flowers by day, and is fertilised by butter- 
flies; therefore it is pink, because pink is an 
attractive colour in the daylight; and it is scent- 
less, because its colour alone is quite enough to 
attract sufficient insects. But it has a close rela- 
tion, the white campion, which flowers by night 
only, and lays itself out to be visited by moths in 
the twilight. Why is this kind white ? Because 
no other colour is seen so well in the dusk ; a red 
or pink blossom would then be almost invisible. 
Moreover, the white campion is heavily scented, 
as are almost all other night-flowering blossoms, 



32 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

like the jasmine, the tuberose, the stephanotis, 
and the gardenia. Observe the numerous points 
of similarity : all these are white; all are sweet- 
scented ; all are moth-fertilised. Why is this ? 
Because the scent helps to show the moth the way 
to the flower when there is hardly enough light 
for him to see the white petals. Thus every plant 
is adapted to its particular station in life, and its 
adaptation is the result of the Struggle for Exist- 
ence, and Survival of the Fittest. 

Briefly put, whatever variation helps the plant 
in any way in any particular place, or at any par- 
ticular time, is likely to give it an extra chance in 
the fight, and is therefore reproduced in all its 
descendants. 

So that is how plants began to vary. 

To sum up. Plants grow, because they keep 
on continually taking in carbon and hydrogen 
from the world outside them, under the influence 
of sunlight. They multiply, because when they 
have attained a certain size they split up to form 
two or more individuals. They struggle for life 
with one another, because more are produced than 
can find means of livelihood. And the struggle 
results in Survival of the Fittest. 

Or, looked at in another light. Plants multi- 
ply, and as they multiply by division the new ones 
on the whole resemble their' parents; this is the 
law of Heredity. But they do not exactly resem- 
ble them in every detail ; this is the law of Vari- 
ation. And as some variations are to the good, 
and some to the bad, the better survive and 
produce young like themselves oftener than the 
worse do ; this is the law of Natural Selection. 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 35 

CHAPTER IV. 

HOW PLANTS EAT. 

We saw in the last chapter how and why plants 
came to differ from one another, but not why they 
came to be divided into well-marked groups or 
kinds, such as primroses, daisies, cabbages, oaks, 
and willows. In the world around us we observe 
a great many different sorts of plants, not all 
mixed up together, so to speak, nor merging into 
one another by endless gradations, but often 
clearly marked off by definite lines into groups or 
families. Thus a primrose is quite distinct from 
a crocus, and an oak from a maple. For the pres- 
ent, however, I do not propose to go into the 
question of how they came to be divided into such 
natural groups. I will begin by telling you briefly 
how plants eat and drink, marry and rear families, 
and then will return later on to this problem of 
the Origin of Species, as it is called, and the 
pedigrees and relationships of the leading plant 
families. 

First of all, then; we will inquire, How Plafits 
Eat. And in this inquiry I will neglect for the 
most part the very early and simple plants we 
have already spoken about, and will chiefly deal 
with those more advanced and complicated types, 
the flowering plants, with which everybody is fa- 
miliar. 

Plants Eat with their Leaves. The leaves are, 
in fact, their mouths and stomachs. 

Now, what is a leaf? It is usually a rather 
thin, flat body, often with two parts, a stalk and 

3 



34 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

a blade, as in the oak or the beech ; though some- 
times the stalk is suppressed, as in grass and the 
teasel. Almost always, however, the leaf is green : 
it is broad and flat, with a large expanded surface, 
and this surface is spread out horizontally, so as 
to catch as much as possible of the sunlight that 
falls upon it. Its business is to swallow carbonic 
acid from the air, and digest and assimilate it un- 
der the influence of sunlight. And as different 
situations require different treatment, various 
plants have leaves of very different shapes, each 
adapted to the habits and manners of the particu- 
lar kind that produces them. The difference has 
been brought about by Natural Selection. 

What does the leaf eat ? Carbonic acid. There 
is a small quantity of this gas always floating about 
dispersed in the air, and plants fight with one an- 
other to get as much as possible of it. Most peo- 
ple imagine plants grow out of the soil. This is 
quite a mistake. The portion of its solid material 
which a plant gets out of the soil (though abso- 
lutely necessary to it) is hardly worth taking into 
consideration, numerically speaking; by far the 
larger part of its substance comes directly out of 
the air as carbon, or out of the water as hydrogen 
and oxygen. You can easily see that this is so if 
you dry a small bush thoroughly, leaves and all, 
and then burn it. What becomes of it in such 
circumstances ? You will find that the greater 
part of it disappears, or goes off into the atmos- 
phere ; the carbon, uniting with oxygen, goes off 
in the form of carbonic acid, while the hydrogen, 
uniting with oxygen, goes off in the form of steam 
or vapour of water. What is there left ? A very 
small quantity of solid matter, which we know as 
ash. Well, that ash, which returns to the soil in 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 35 

the solid condition, is practically almost the only 
part the plant got from the soil ; the rest returns 
as gas and vapour to the air and water, from 
which the plant took them. You must never for- 
get this most important fact, that plants grow 
mainly from air and water, and hardly at all from 
the soil beneath them. Unless you keep it firmly 
in mind, you will not understand a great deal that 
follows. 

Why, then, do gardeners and farmers think so 
much about the soil and so little about the air, 
which is the chief source of all living material ? 
We shall answer that question in the next chapter, 
when we come to consider What Plants Drink, and 
what food they take up dissolved in their water. 

Carbonic acid, though itself a gas, is the chief 
source of the solid material of plants. How do 
plants eat it ? By means of the green leaves, which 
suck in floating particles of the gaseous food. 
Their eating is thus more like breathing than 
ours: nevertheless, it is true feeding: it is their 
way of taking in fresh material for building up 
their bodies. If you examine a thin slice from a 
leaf under the microscope, you will find that its 
upper surface consists of a layer of cells with 
transparent walls, and no colouring matter (Fig. 
1). These cells are full of water; they form a 
sort of water-cushion on the top of the leaf, which 
drinks in carbonic acid (or, to be quite correct, its 
floating form, carbon dioxide) from the air about 
it. Immediately below this cushion of water-cells 
you come again upon a firm layer of closely-packed 
green cells, filled with living green-stuff, which take 
the carbonic acid in turn from the water-cells, and 
manufacture it forthwith into sugars, starches, and 



2,6 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

other materials of living bodies. The lowest 
spongy part evaporates unnecessary water, and 
so helps to keep up circulation. 

The plant has often many hundred leaves, that 
is to say, many hundred mouths and stomachs. 
Why do plants need so many when we have but 



auuanDaoQpqcggr 




iDDOoaoooaDDa 



Fig. i. — A thin slice from a leaf, seen under the microscope. On 
top are water-cells, which suck in carbonic acid. Beneath these 
are green cells, which assimilate it under the influence of sun- 
light. The spongy lower portion is used for evaporation. 

one ? Because they cannot move, and because 
their food is a gas, diffused in minute quantities 
through all the atmosphere. They have to suck 
it in wherever they can find it. And what do 
they do with the carbonic acid when once they 
have got it ? Well, to answer that question, I 
must tell you a little more about what the ordi- 
nary green leaf is made of, and especially about 
the green-stuff in its central cells. 

Now what is this green-stuff ? It is the true 
life-material of the plant, the origin of all the 
living matter in nature. You and I, as well as the 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 37 

plants themselves, are entirely built up of living 
jelly which this green-stuff has manufactured 
under the influence of sunlight. And the mate- 
rial that does this is such an important thing in 
the history of life that I will venture to trouble 
you with its scientific name, Chlorophyll. 
When sunlight falls upon the Chlorophyll or 
green-stuff in a living leaf, in the presence of 
carbonic acid and water, the chlorophyll (or, to be 
quite accurate, the living matter or protoplasm 
with chlorophyll embedded in it) at once proceeds 
to set free the oxygen (which it turns loose upon 
the air again), and to build up the carbon and hy- 
drogen (with a little oxygen) by various stages 
into a material called starch. This starch, as you 
know, possesses energy — that is to say, latent light 
and dormant heat and movement, because we can 
eat it and burn it within our bodies. Other mate- 
rials, hydro-carbons and carbo-hydrates, as they 
are called, are made in the same way. The main 
use of leaves, then, is to eat carbon and drink 
water, and, under the influence of sunlight, to take 
in energy and build them up into living material. 
The starch and sugar and other things thus 
made are afterwards dissolved in the sap, and 
used by the plant to manufacture new cells and 
leaves, or to combine with other important mate- 
rials of which I shall speak hereafter, in order to 
form fresh protoplasm with chlorophyll in it. 

Now we know what leaves are for; and you 
can easily see, therefore, that they are by far 
the most essential and important part of the 
entire plant. Most plants, in fact, consist of 
little else than colonies of leaves, together with 
the flowers which are their reproductive or- 
gans. We have next to see What Shapes various 



38 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

Leaves assume, and what are their reasons for do- 
ing so. 

The leaf has, as a rule, to be broad and flat, 
in order to catch as much carbon as possible ; it 
has also usually to be expanded horizontally to 
the sunlight, so as to catch and fix it. For this 
reason, most leaves that can raise themselves 
freely to the sun and air are flat and horizontal. 
But in very crowded and overgrown spots, like 
thickets and hedgerows, the leaves have to fight 
hard with one another for air and sunlight ; and 
in such places particular kinds of plants have 
been developed, with leaves of special forms 
adapted to the situation. The fittest have sur- 
vived, and have assumed such shapes as natural 
selection dictated. 

Where the plants are large and grow freely 
upward, with plenty of room, the leaves are usu- 
ally broad and expanded, as in the tobacco-plant 
and the sunflower. Where the plants grow thick 
and close in meadows, the leaves are mostly long 
and narrow, like grasses. In overgrown clumps 
and hedgerows they are generally much subdi- 
vided into numerous little leaflets, as is the case 
with most ferns, and also with herb-Robert, chervil, 
milfoil, and vetches. In these last cases, the plant 
wants to get as much of the floating carbonic 
acid, and of the sunlight, as it can ; and therefore 
it makes its leaves into a sort of divided network, 
so as to entrap the smallest passing atom of car- 
bon, and to intercept such stray rays of broken 
sunlight as have not been caught by the taller 
plants above it. In almost all cases, too, the 
leaves on the same plant are so arranged round 
the stem and on the branches as to interfere with 
one another as little as possible; they are placed 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 39 

in an order which allows the sunshine to reach 
every leaf, and which secures a free passage of 
air between them. 

An interesting example of the way some of 
these principles work out in practice is afforded 
us by a common little English pond-weed, the 
water-crowfoot. This curious plant grows in 
streams and lakes, and has two quite different 
types of leaves, one floating, and one submerged. 
The floating leaves have plenty of room to de- 
velop themselves freely on the surface of the 
pond ; they loll on the top, well supported by the 
mass of water beneath ; and, as there is little 
competition, they can get an almost unlimited 
supply of carbonic acid and sunshine. There- 
fore, they are large and roundish, like a very full 
ivy-leaf. But the submerged leaves wave up and 
down in the water below, and have to catch what 
little dissolved carbonic acid they can find in the 
pond around them. Therefore they are dissected 
into endless hair-like ends, which move freely 
about in the moving water in search of food- 
stuff. The two types may be aptly compared to 
lungs and gills, only in the one case it is car- 
bonic acid and in the other case oxygen, that 
the highly-dissected organs are seeking in the 
water. 

As a general rule, when a plant can spread its 
leaves freely about through unoccupied air, with 
plenty of sunlight, it makes them circular, or 
nearly so, and supports them by means of a stem 
in the middle. This is particularly the case with 
floating river-plants, such as the water-lily and 
the water-gentian. But even terrestrial plants, 
when they can raise their foliage easily into 
unoccupied space, free from competition, have 



40 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

similar round leaves, supported by a central leaf- 
stalk, as is the case with the familiar garden 
annual popularly (though erroneously) known as 
nasturtium. (Its real name is Tropseolum.) On 
the other hand, when a plant has to struggle 
hard for carbon and sunlight in overgrown 
thickets, or under the water, it has usually very 
much subdivided leaves, minutely cut, again and 
again, into endless segments. Submerged leaves 
invariably display this tendency. 

But that does not conclude the whole set of 
circumstances which govern the forms and size 
of leaves. Not only do they want to eat, and to 
have access to sunshine ; they must also be sup- 
ported or held in place so as to catch it. For 
this purpose they have need of what we may 
venture to describe as foliar architecture. This 
architecture takes the form of ribs or beams of 
harder material, which ramify through and raise 
aloft the softer and actively living cell-stuff. 
They are, as it were, the skeleton or framework 
of the leaf; and in what are commonly known 
as " skeleton leaves " the living cell-stuff between 
has been rotted away, so as to display this harder 
underlying skeleton or framework. It is com- 
posed of specially hardened, lengthened, and 
strengthened cells, and is intended, not only to 
do certain living work in the plant (as we shall 
see hereafter), but also to form a supporting 
scaffolding. The material of which ribs or beams 
are composed is called " vascular tissue " — a not 
very well chosen name, as this material has only 
a slight analogy to what is called the vascular 
system (or network of blood-vessels) in an animal 
body. It is much more like the bony skeleton. 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 



41 



Similarly, the ribs themselves are usually called 
veins — a very bad name again, as they are much 
more like the bones of a wing or hand ; they are 
mainly there for support, as a bony or wooden 
framework, though they also act for the convey- 
ance of sap or water. 

And now we are in a position to begin to 
understand the various shapes of leaves as we 
see them in nature. They depend most of all 
upon certain inherited types of ribs or so-called 
veins, and these types are usually pretty constant 
in great groups of plants closely related by de- 
scent to one another. The immense difference in 
their external shape (which often varies enor- 
mously even on the same stem) is mainly due to 
the relative extent to which the framework is 
filled out or not with living cell-stuff, or, as it is 
technically called, cellular tissue. 

There are two chief ways of arranging the ribs 
or veins in a leaf, which may be distinguished as 





Fig. 2. — Finger-veined leaves. The veins are the same in the three 
leaves, but they differ in the amount to which they are filled in. 



the finger-like and the feather-like methods (in tech- 
nical language, palmate and pinnate*). In the fin- 
ger-like plan the ribs all diverge from a common 
point, more or less radially. In the feather-like 



42 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



plan the ribs are arranged in opposite pairs along 
the sides of a common line or midrib. Yet even 
these two distinct plans merge into one another 
by imperceptible degrees, as you can see if you 
look at the accompanying diagram. 

Now let us take first the finger-veined type 
(Fig. 2). Here, if all the interstices of the ribs 
are fully filled out with cellular tissue, we get a 
roundish leaf like that of the so-called nastur- 
tium. But if the ribs project a little at the edge 
— in other words, if the cellular tissue does not 






Fig. 3. — Feather- veined leaves. The four leaves have similar 
veins, but are differently filled in. 

quite fill out the whole space between them — we 
get a slightly indented leaf, like that of the scar- 
let geranium or the common mallow. If the un- 
filled spaces between the ends of the ribs are 
much greater, then the ribs project into marked 
points or lobes, and we get a leaf like that of ivy. 
Carry the starving of the cellular tissue a little 
further still, and we have a deeply-indented leaf 
like that of the castor-oil plant. Finally, let the 
spaces unfilled go right down to the common 
centre from which the ribs radiate, and we get a 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 



43 



divided or compound leaf, like that of the horse- 
chestnut, with three, five, or seven separate leaf- 
lets. (See Fig. 5, No. 1.) 

Similarly with the feather -veined type (Fig. 3) ; 
the spaces between the ribs may be more or less 




Fig. 4. 



-Two leaves. I, finger-veined, but lobed, like scarlet gera- 
nium; II, feather-veined, but lobed, like oak. 




Fig. 5. — Two leaves. I, finger-veined, but divided into separate 
leaflets, like horse-chestnut ; II, feather-veined, but divided into 
separate leaflets, like vetch. 

filled with cellular tissue in any degree you choose 
to mention. When they are very fully filled out, 
you get a leaf like that of bladder senna. A little 
more pointed, and less filled out at the tips, it be- 



44 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

comes like argel. When the edge is not quite 
filled out, but irregularly indented, we get forms 
like the oak leaf. Finally, when the indentations 
go to the very bottom of each vein, so as to reach 
the midrib, we get a compound leaf like that of 
the vetch, with a number of opposite and distinct 
leaflets. 

The reason why some leaves are thus more 
filled out than others is simply this : it depends 
upon the freedom of their access to air and sun- 
light. I do not mean the freedom of access of 
the particular leaf or the particular plant, but the 
average ancestral freedom of access in the kind 
they belong to. Each kind has adapted itself, as 
a rule, to certain situations for which it has spe- 
cial advantages, and it has learnt by the teaching 
of natural selection to produce such leaves as best 
fit its chosen site and habits. Where access to 
carbon and sunlight are easy, plants usually pro- 
duce very full round leaves, with all the inter- 
stices between the ribs filled amply in with cellular 
tissue ; but where access is difficult, they usually 
produce rather starved and unfilled leaves, which 
consist, as it were, of scarcely covered skeletons 
(Figs. 4 and 5). This last condition is particu- 
larly observable in submerged leaves, and in those 
which grow in very crowded situations. 

The two types of rib-arrangement to which I 
have already called attention exist for the most 
part in one of the two great groups of flowering 
plants about which I shall have more to say to 
you hereafter. There is yet a third type, how- 
ever, which occurs in the other great group (that 
of the grasses and lilies), and it is known as the 
parallel (Fig. 6). In this type, the ribs do not 
form a radiating network at all, but run straight, 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 



45 



quite 




or nearly so, through the leaves. Examples of it 
occur in almost all grasses, and in tulips, daffo- 
dils, lily of the valley, and narcissus. Leaves of 
this sort have seldom any leaf-stalk ; they usually 
rise straight out of the ground, more or less erect, 
and their architectural plan is generally 
simple. They are seldom 
toothed, and hardly ever 
divided into deeply - cut 
segments or separate leaf- 
lets. 

A few more peculiari- 
ties in the shapes of leaves 
must still be noted, and 
a few words used in de- 
scribing them must be ex- 
plained very briefly. When 
the leaf consists all of one 
piece, no matter how much 
cut up and indented at the 
edge, it is said to be " simple " ; but if it is divided 
into distinct leaflets (as in Fig. 5), it is called 
" compound." If the edge is unindented all round 
(as in Fig. 6), we say the leaf is " entire"; if the 
ribs form small projections at the edge (as in 
Fig. 4), we call it " toothed " ; if the divisions are 
deeper, we say it is " lobed " ; and when the lobes 
are very deeply cut indeed, we call it " dissected." 
Thus, in order to describe accurately the shape 
of a leaf, we need only say which way it is veined 
or ribbed — whether finger-wise, feather-wise, or 
with parallel veins — and how much, if at all, it is 
cut or divided. 

Endless varieties, however, occur, in accord- 
ance with the peculiar place the plant and its 
kind have been developed to inhabit. In climb- 



II 

Fig. 6. — I, parallel veins, as 
seen in one great group 
of plants, the lilies ; II, 
branching veins, as seen in 
another great group, the 
trees and herbs of the 
usual type. 



46 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

ing plants, for example, the leaves are usually 
opposite, so as to clutch more readily, and they 
are almost always more or less heart-shaped at ■ 
the base, as in convolvulus and black briony. 
The leaves of forest trees, on the other hand, 
tend to be what is known as ovate in shape, like 
the beech and the poplar ; while those of the 
lime are a little one-sided, in order that each leaf 
may not overshadow and rob its neighbour. This 
one-sidedness is even more markedly seen in the 
hot-house begonias. Some leaves, again, are mi- 
nutely subdivided into leaflets twice or three 
times over; such leaves are said to be doubly or 
trebly compound. But if you study plants as 
they grow (and this book is written in the hope 
that it may induce you to do so), you will gener- 
ally be able to see that the shapes and peculiari- 
ties of leaves have some obvious reference to 
their place in the world, and their habits and 
manners. 

I have spoken so far mainly of quite central 
and typical leaves, which are arranged with a 
single view to the need for feeding. But plants 
are exposed to many dangers in life besides the 
danger of starvation, and they guard in various 
ways against all these dangers. One very ob- 
vious one is the danger of being devoured by 
grazing animals, and, to protect themselves 
against it, many plants produce leaves which are 
prickly, or stinging, or otherwise unpleasant. 
The common holly is a familiar instance. In 
this case the ribs are prolonged into stiff and 
prickly points, which wound the tender noses of 
donkeys or cattle. We can easily see how such a 
protection could be acquired by the holly-bush 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 47 

through the action of Variation and Natural Se- 
lection. For holly grows chiefly in rough and 
wild spots, where all the green leaves are liable 
to be eaten by herbivorous animals. If, there- 
fore, any plant showed the slightest tendency 
towards prickliness or thorniness, it would be 
more likely to survive than its unprotected neigh- 
bours. And indeed, as a matter of fact, you will 
soon see that almost all the bushes and shrubs 
which frequent commons, such as gorse, butcher's 
broom, hawthorn, blackthorn, and heather, are 
more or less spiny, though in most of these cases 
it is the branches, not the leaves, that form the 
defensive element. Holly, however, wastes no 
unnecessary material on defensive spikes, for 
though the lower leaves, within reach of the cat- 
tle and donkeys, are very prickly indeed, you will 
find, if you look, that the upper ones, above six 
or eight feet from the ground, are smooth-edged 
and harmless. These upper leaves stand in no 
practical danger of being eaten, and the holly 
therefore takes care to throw away no valuable 
material in protecting them from a wholly imagi- 
nary assailant. 

Often, too, in these prickly plants we can 
trace some memorial of their earlier history. 
Gorse, for example, is a peaflower by family, a 
member of the great group of " papilionaceous," 
or butterfly-blossomed, plants, which includes the 
pea, the bean, the laburnum, the clover, and many 
other familiar trees, shrubs, and climbers. It is 
descended more immediately from a special set 
of trefoil-leaved peaflowers, like the clovers and 
lucernes; but owing to its chosen home on open 
uplands, almost all its upper leaves have been 
transformed for purposes of defence into sharp, 



48 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

spine-like prickles. Indeed, the leaves and 
branches are both prickly together, so that it is 
difficult at first sight to discriminate between 
them. But if you take a seedling gorse plant you 
will find that in its early stages it still produces 
trefoil leaves, like its clover-like ancestors; and 
these leaves are almost exactly similar to those 
of the common genista so much cultivated in 
hot-houses. As the plant grows, however, the 
trefoil leaves gradually give place to long and 
narrow blades, and these in turn to prickly spines, 
like the adult gorse-leaves Hence we are justi- 
fied in believing that the ancestors of gorse were 
once genistas, bearing trefoil leaves; and that 
later, through the action of natural selection, the 
prickliest among them survived, till they acquired 
their existing spiny foliage. In every case, in- 
deed, young plants tend to resemble their earlier an- 
cestors, and only as they grow up acquire their 
later and more special characteristics. 

And now I must add one word about the ori- 
gin of leaves in general. Very simple plants, we 
saw, consist of a single cell, which is not merely 
a leaf, but also at the same time a flower, a seed, 
a root, a branch, and everything. In other words, 
in very simple plants a single cell does rather 
badly everything which in more advanced and 
developed plants is better done by distinct and 
highly-adapted organs. The whole evolution of 
plants consists, in fact, in the telling off of par- 
ticular parts to do better what the primitive cell 
did for itself but badly. Above the very simple 
plants which consist of a single cell come other 
plants, which consist of many cells placed end on 
end together, as in the case of the hair-like water- 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 49 

weeds; and above these again come other and 
rather higher plants, in which the cellular tissue 
assumes the form of a flat and leaf-like blade, as 
in many broad sea-weeds. None of these, how- 
ever, are called leaves in the strict sense, because 
they consist of cells alone, without any ribs or 
supporting framework. The higher types, how- 
ever, like ferns and flowering plants, have such 
ribs or frameworks, made of that stiffer and 
tougher material called vascular tissue. This is 
the most general distinction that exists between 
plants; the higher ones are known as Vascular 
Plants, including all those with true leaves, such 
as the common trees, herbs, and shrubs, and the 
ferns and grasses — in fact, almost all the things 
ever thought of as plants by most ordinary ob- 
servers; the lower ones are known as Cellular 
Plants, and include the kinds without true leaves 
or vascular tissue, such as the seaweeds, fungi, 
and microscopic plants only recognised as a rule 
by botanical students. 

The higher plants, then, have for the most 
part special organs, the leaves, told off to do 
work for them as mouths and stomachs; while 
other organs are told off to do other special work 
of their own — as the roots to drink, the flowers to 
reproduce, the fruit and seeds to carry on the life 
of the species to other generations, and so forth, 
down to the hairs that protect the surface, or the 
glands that produce honey to attract the fertilis- 
ing insects. To the end, however, all parts of the 
plant retain the power to eat carbonic acid, if 
necessary ; so that many higher plants have no 
true leaves, but use portions of the stem or 
branches for the purpose of feeding. Any part 
of the plant which contains the active living 
4 



50 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

green-stuff, or chlorophyll, can perform the func- 
tions of a leaf. In very dry or desert places, 
leaves would be useless, because their flat and 
exposed blades would allow the water within to 
evaporate too readily. Hence most desert plants, 
like the cactuses, and many kinds of acacias and 
euphorbias, have no true leaves at all ; in their 
place they have thick and fleshy stems, often very 
leaf-like in shape, and curiously jointed. These 
stems are covered with a thick, transparent skin 
or epidermis, to resist evaporation, and are pro- 
tected by numerous stinging hairs or spines, 
which serve to keep off the attacks of animals. 
Stems of this type are used as reservoirs of water, 
which the plant sucks up during the infrequent 
rains ; and as they contain chlorophyll, like leaves, 
they serve in just the same way as swallowersand 
digesters of carbonic acid. 

Many other plants which live in dry or sandy 
places, like our common English stone-crops, do 
not go quite as far as the cactuses, but have thick 
and fleshy leaves on thick and fleshy stems, to 
prevent evaporation. As a general rule, indeed, 
the drier the situation a plant habitually frequents 
the fleshier are its leaves, and the greater its tend- 
ency to make the stem share in the work of feed- 
ing, or even to get rid of foliage altogether. In 
Australia, however, most of the forest trees, like 
the eucalyptuses, have got over the same difficulty 
in a different way ; they arrange their leaves on 
the stem so as to stand vertically to the sun's 
rays, instead of horizontally, which saves evapo- 
ration, and makes the woodland almost entirely 
shadeless. Many of these Australian trees, how- 
ever, have no true leaves, but use in their place 
flattened green branches. 



HOW PLANTS EAT. 5 I 

Some plants are annuals, and some perennials. 
When annuals have flowered and set their seed 
they wither and die. But perennials go on for 
several seasons. Most of them, however, in cold 
climates at least, shed their leaves on the approach 
of winter. But they do not lose all the valuable 
material stored up in them. Trees and shrubs 
withdraw the starchy matter into a special layer 
of the bark, where it remains safe from the winter 
frosts, and is used up again in spring in forming 
the new foliage. This new foliage is usually pro- 
vided for in the preceding season. If you look 
at a tree in late autumn, after the leaves have 
fallen, you will see that it is covered by little 
knobs which we know as buds. These buds are 
the foliage of the coming season. The outer part 
consists of several layers of dry brown scales, 
which- serve as an overcoat to protect the tender 
young leaves within from the chilly weather. 
But the inner layers consist of the delicate young 
leaves themselves, which are destined to sprout 
and grow as soon as spring comes round again. 
Even the scales, indeed, are very small leaves, 
with no living material in them ; they are sacri- 
ficed by the plant, as it were, in order to keep 
the truer leaves within snug and warm for the 
winter. Nor do the autumn leaves fall off by 
pure accident ; some time before they drop the 
tree arranges for their fall by making a special 
row of empty cells where the leaf-stalk joins the 
stem or branch ; and when frost comes on, the 
leaf separates quietly and naturally at that point 
as soon as the valuable starchy and living mate- 
rial has been withdrawn and stored in the perma- 
nent layers of the bark for future service. 

Smaller and more succulent plants do not 



5 2 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

thus withdraw their living material into the bark 
in autumn ; but they attain much the same end in 
different manners. Thus lilies and onions store 
the surplus material they lay by during the sum- 
mer at the base of their long leaves, and the 
swollen bases thus formed produce what we call 
a bulb, which carries on the life of the plant to 
the next season. Other plants, like the common 
English orchids, store material in underground 
tubers; while others, again, and by far the great- 
er number, so store it in the root, which is some- 
times thick and swollen, or in an underground 
stem or root-stock. In most cases, however, per- 
ennial plants take care to keep over their live 
material from one season to the other by some 
such means of permanent storage. They are, so 
to speak, capitalists. Natural selection has of 
course preserved those plants which thus laid by 
for the future, and has killed out the mere spend- 
thrifts which were satisfied to live for the fleeting 
moment only. The soil of our meadows in win- 
ter is full of tubers, bulbs, and root-stocks; while 
our shrubs and trees carry over their capital from 
season to season in their living bark, secure from 
injury. In one way or another all our perennial 
plants manage to tide their living green-stuff, or 
at least its raw material, by hook or by crook, 
over the dangers of winter. 

I have given so much space to the subject of 
leaves because, as you must see, the leaf is really 
the most important and essential part of the en- 
tire plant — the part for whose sake all the rest 
exists, and in which the main work of making 
living material out of lifeless carbonic acid and 
water is concentrated. 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 53 

Let us sum up briefly the main facts we have 
learned in this long chapter. 

Plants eat carbonic acid under the influence 
of sunlight. They store up the solar energy thus 
derived in starches and green-stuff in their own 
bodies. Very simple plants, which float freely in 
water, eat and drink with all portions of their 
surface. But higher plants eat with special or- 
gans. These organs are known as leaves, and 
are the parts where the chief business of the 
plant is transacted. 

A leaf is an expanded mass of cells, containing 
living green-stuff, supported on a tougher frame- 
work, or rib-like skeleton. Leaves take in car- 
bonic acid by means of tiny absorbing mouths, 
which exist on their upper surface; and they 
turn loose most of the oxygen, by the aid of sun- 
light, building up the carbon into starch, with 
hydrogen from the water supplied by the roots to 
them. Leaves are of different shapes, according 
to the work they have to do for the plant in 
different situations. Where carbon and sunlight 
abound they are round, or nearly so ; where car- 
bon and sunlight are scanty, or much competed 
for, they are more or less divided into minute 
sections. 



CHAPTER V. 

HOW PLANTS DRINK. 

We have now learnt that plants really eat for 
the most part with their leaves. They grow, on 
the whole, out of the air, not, as most people 
seem to fancy, out of the soil. Yet you must 



54 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

have noticed that farmers and gardeners think a 
great deal about the ground in which they plant 
things, and very little, apparently, about the air 
around them. What is the reason for this curi- 
ous neglect of the real food of plants, and this 
curious importance attached to the mould or soil 
they root in ? 

That is the question we shall have to consider 
in the present chapter; and I shall answer it in 
part at once by saying beforehand that, though 
plants do grow for the most part out of the car- 
bonic acid supplied by the air to the leaves, they 
also require certain things from the soil, less im- 
portant in bulk, but extremely necessary for their 
growth and development. What they eat through 
their leaves is far the greatest in amount; but 
what they drink through their roots is neverthe- 
less indispensable for the production of that liv- 
ing green-stuff, chlorophyll, which, as we saw, is 
the original manufacturer and prime maker of all 
the material of life, either vegetable or animal. 

Plants have roots. These roots perform for 
them two or three separate functions. They fix 
the plant firmly in the soil; they suck up the 
water which circulates in the sap ; and they also 
gather in solution certain other materials which 
are necessary parts of the plant's living matter. 

The first and most obvious function of the 
root is to fix the plant firmly in the soil it grows in. 
Very early floating plants, of course, have no 
roots at all ; they take in water and the dissolved 
materials it contains, with every part of their 
surface equally, just as they take in carbonic 
acid with every part of their surface equally. 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 55 

They are all root, all leaf, all flower, all fruit. 
But higher plants tend to produce different or- 
gans, which have become specially adapted by 
natural selection for special purposes. If you 
sow a pea or bean you will find at once that the 
young seedling begins from the very first to dis- 
tinguish carefully between two main parts of its 
body. In one direction', it pushes downward, 
forming a tiny root, which insinuates itself with 
care among the stones and soil; in the other 
direction, it pushes upward, forming a baby stem, 
which gradually clothes itself with leaves and 
flowers. 

The tip of the root is the part of the plant 
which exercises the greatest discrimination and 
ingenuity, so much so that Darwin likened it to 
the brain of animals. For it goes feeling its way 
underground, touching here, recoiling there, in- 
sinuating little fingers among pebbles and cran- 
nies, and trying its best by endless offshoots to 
fix the plant with perfect security. Large trees, 
in particular, need very firm roots, to moor them 
in their places, and withstand the force of the 
winds to which they are often subject. After 
every great storm, as we know, big oaks and 
pines may be seen uprooted by the power of this 
invisible but very dangerous enemy. 

The root, however, does not serve merely to 
anchor the plant to one spot, and secure it a 
place in which to grow and feed ; it also drinks 
water. The hairs and tips of the root absorb 
moisture from the soil ; and this water circulates 
freely as sap through the entire plant, dissolving 
and carrying with it the starches and other ma- 
terials which each part requires for its growth and 



56 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



nourishment (Figs. 7, 8, and 9). Without water, 
as we all know, plants will wither and die; and 

the roots push down- 
ward and outward in 
every direction in 
search of this neces- 
sary of life for the 
leaves and flowers. 

In addition to these 
two functions of fixing 
the plant and drinking 
water, however, roots 
perform a third and al- 
most more important 
one in absorbing the oth- 
er needful materials 
of plant life from the 
soil about them. They 
drink, not water alone, 
but other things dis- 
solved in it. 

What are these oth- 
er things? Well, the 
answer to that ques- 
tion will fairly round 
&^£ "fS £- g Roo t fl °of 'ihl off our first rough idea 

radish. The small hair-like ends of the raw materials 
drink in water and dissolved t ^ a t life is made up 
food " salts - from. We saw already 

that plants eat carbon and hydrogen from the air 
and water; out of these they manufacture a large 
number of compounds, such as starches, oils, 
sugars, and so forth, all of which contain a little 
oxygen, but far less than the amount contained in 
the carbonic acid and water from which they are 




Fig. 9. 



Fig. 7. — Root of the carrot. Fig. 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 57 

manufactured. These useful materials, however, 
though possessing energy, that is to say the power 
of producing light and heat and motion, are not 
exactly live-stuffs; in order to make out of them 
the living green matter of leaves, chlorophyll, or 
the living cell-stuff of all bodies, animal or vege- 
table, protoplasm, we must have a fourth element, 
nitrogen ; and that element is supplied by the roots 
in solution. 

So now you see the full importance of the 
roots ; they add to the oils and starches manu- 
factured in the leaves that mysterious body, ni- 
trogen, which is necessary in order to turn these 
things into protoplasm and chlorophyll. 

A few other things besides nitrogen are also 
needed by the plant from the soil ; the most im- 
portant of these are sulphur and phosphorus. 
The plant, however, does not take in these sub- 
stances in their free or simple form, as nitrogen, 
sulphur, and phosphorus, but in composition, as 
soluble nitrates, sulphates, and phosphates. 

Now, I am not going to trouble you with a 
long chemical account of how the plant combines 
these various materials — a thing about which 
even chemists and botanists themselves know as 
yet but very little. It will be enough to say here 
that the plant builds them up at last into an ex 
tremely complex body, called protoplasm j and 
this protoplasm is the ultimate living matter, the 
" physical basis of life ; " the thing without which 
there could be no plants or animals possible. 

What is protoplasm — this mysterious stuff, 
which builds up the bodies of plants and animals ? 
It is a curious transparent jelly-like substance, 
full of tiny microscopic grains, and composed of 



58 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulphur. 
Sometimes it is almost watery, sometimes half- 
horny, but as a rule it is waxy or soft in texture. 
It is very plastic. Its peculiar characteristic is 
that it is restlessly alive, so to speak; seen under 
a microscope, it moves about uneasily, with a 
strange streaming motion, as if in search of some- 
thing it wanted. It is, in point of fact, the build- 
ing-material of life ; and out of it the living parts 
of every creature that lives, whether animal or 
vegetable, are framed and compounded. 

But it is plants alone that know how to make 
protoplasm, or other organic matter, direct from 
the dead material around them. Animals can only 
take living matter ready-made from plants, and 
burn it up again by reunion with oxygen in their 
own bodies. The plant manufactures it. The ani- 
mal destroys it. Chlorophyll bodies or the active 
green-stuff of leaves is a special modification or va- 
riety of protoplasm ; and chlorophyll alone pos- 
sesses the power to manufacture new energy- 
yielding and living material, under the influence of 
sunlight, from the dead and inert bodies around it. 
The materials which it thus produces are after- 
wards worked up by the plant, together with the ni- 
trogen, sulphur, and phosphorus supplied by the 
roots, into fresh starch and fresh protoplasm, con- 
taining fresh chlorophyll. These the animal may 
afterwards eat in the form of leaves, seeds, or fruits. 

The tiniest primitive one-celled plant contains 
protoplasm and chlorophyll (though a few degen- 
erate plants, like fungi, have none of the living 
green-stuff, and can make no new living' material 
for themselves, but depend, like animals, upon the 
industry of others). Every living cell of every 
plant contains protoplasm; a cell without any is 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 59 

dead and lifeless. Protoplasm, in short, is the 
only living material we know ; and its life constitutes 
the larger life of the wholes compounded of it. 

Well, now you are in a position to see why the 
farmer and the gardener attach so much impor- 
tance to the soil, and so little, apparently, to the 
air and the sunlight. The reason is that the air 
is everywhere; you get it for nothing; but the 
soil costs money, and, when cultivated, it requires 
to be supplied from time to time with fresh stores 
of the particular materials the plants take from it. 

Let me give two simple parallel cases. A fire 
is made by the combination of two sorts of fuel — 
coal and oxygen. One is just as necessary for 
fire-making as the other. But we buy coal dear, 
and we neglect to take oxygen into consideration 
accordingly. The reason is that oxygen exists 
in abundance everywhere; so we don't have to 
buy it. If we paid a pound a ton for it, as we do 
with coal, we should very soon remember how 
necessary a part it is of every fire. Even at pres- 
ent we are obliged to provide for its free admis- 
sion by the bars of the grate, and by checking or 
regulating its ingress we can slacken or quicken 
the burning of the fire. 

Or, to take another analogy, oxygen is just as 
necessary to human beings and other animals as 
food and drink are. But, as a rule, we get oxygen 
everywhere in such great abundance that we never 
think of taking it into practical consideration. 
Still, in the Black Hole of Calcutta, the unhappy 
prisoners thoroughly realised the full value of 
oxygen, and would gladly have paid its weight in 
gold for the life-giving element. 

Now, carbonic acid, on which plants mainly 



60 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

live, is not so common or so abundant a gas as 
oxygen ; but still, it exists in considerable quanti- 
ties in the air everywhere. So most plants are 
able to get almost as much as they need of it. 
Nevertheless, submerged plants, and plants that 
grow in very crowded places, seem to compete 
hard with one another for this aerial food; and in 
certain cases they appear to live, as it were, in a 
very Black Hole of Calcutta, so far as regards the 
supply of this necessary material. In farms and 
gardens, however, the farmer takes care that every 
plant shall have plenty of room and space — in 
other words, free access to sunlight and carbonic 
acid. He " gives the plants air," as he says, not 
knowing that he is really supplying them with 
their aerial food-stuff. He does this by keeping 
down weeds — by ploughing, by digging, by hoe- 
ing, by tilling. Indeed, what do we really mean 
by cultivation ? Nothing more than destroying 
the native vegetation of a place, in order to make 
room for other plants that we desire to multiply. 
We plough out the grasses and herbs that occupy 
the soil ; we sow or plant thinly seeds or cuttings 
of corn or vines or potatoes that we desire to 
propagate. We give these new plants plenty of 
space and air — in other words, free access to sun- 
light and carbonic acid. And that is the funda- 
mental basis of cultivation — to keep down certain 
natural plants of the place, in order to give free 
room to others. 

But as the crop-plants require to root them- 
selves, the farmer naturally thinks most of the 
soil they root in — which he has to buy or rent, 
while the carbonic acid comes freely to him, un- 
perceived, with the breath of heaven. Where 
water is scarce, as in irrigated desert lands, the 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 6 1 

farmer recognises quite equally the importance of 
water. But he never recognises the true impor- 
tance of carbonic acid. That is why most people 
wrongly imagine that plants grow out of the soil, 
not out of the air. Still, when we burn them, the 
truth becomes clear. The portion of the plants 
derived from air and water goes off again into 
the air in the act of burning : so too does the 
nitrogen : the remaining portion derived direct 
from the soil is only the insignificant residue re- 
turned to the soil as ash when we burn the 
plant up. 

Nevertheless, the farmer often needs to sup- 
ply certain raw materials to the soil for the plants 
he cultivates. These raw materials are called 
manures ; they are mostly rich in nitrates and 
phosphates ; and as they are usually the only 
things directly supplied to plants by human 
agency — the carbonic acid and water being sup- 
plied by wind and rain in the ordinary course of 
nature — they help to strengthen the popular mis- 
apprehension that plants grow directly out of the 
soil. Manures consist chiefly of compounds of 
nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash. These are the 
things of which the plants take most from the 
soil; and when the crops are cut down and car- 
ried away, it becomes necessary to restore them. 
This is generally done by means of farmyard 
manure, bones, or guano. Most manures are 
really the remains or droppings of animals; so 
that when we lay them on the soil, we are merely 
returning to it in another form what the animaj 
took from it when he ate the plants up. 

All plants, however, do not equally exhaust 
the soil of all necessary materials. Some require 



62 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

one sort of food, and others another. That is 
why farmers have recourse to what is called rota- 
tion of crops, so as to follow up one sort of plant 
in a field by another, whose needs are different. 
Thus corn is alternated with swedes or turnips. 
Virgin soil will produce crops for several seasons 
together without the need for manuring ; but 
when many crops have been cut from it in suc- 
cession, the earth gets exhausted of nitrates and 
phosphates, and then it becomes necessary to 
manure and to rotate the crops in the ordinary 
manner. 

But in nature crops are not, as a rule, removed 
from the soil ; they die and wither, and return to 
it for the most part whatever they took from it. 
The dead birds and insects, and the droppings of 
animals, are sufficient manure for the native wood- 
land. Still, even in nature, certain plants more 
or less exhaust the soil of certain valuable ma- 
terials ; and therefore natural selection has se- 
cured a sort of roundabout rotation of crops in a 
way of which I shall have more to say hereafter. 
Many plants, for example, which greatly exhaust 
the soil, have winged or feathery seeds ; and these 
seeds are carried by the wind to fresh spots, where 
they alight and root themselves, in order to es- 
cape the exhausted soil in the neighbourhood of 
their mothers. Other plants send out runners, as 
they are called, on long trailing branches, which 
root at a distance, and so start fresh lives in ex- 
hausted places. Yet others have tubers, which 
shift their place from year to year ; or they push 
forth underground suckers, which become new 
plants at a distance from the parent. All these 
are different natural ways for obtaining what is 
practically rotation of crops ; nature invented that 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 63 

plan millions and millions of years before it was 
discovered by European farmers. 

Moreover, nature sometimes even goes in for 
deliberate manuring. Plants like buttercups and 
daisies, that live in ordinary meadow soils, to be 
sure, get enough nitrogen and sulphur and other 
such constituents from the mould in which they 
are rooted. But in very moist and boggy soils 
there is generally a lack of these necessary earth- 
given elements of protoplasm; and natural selec- 
tion has therefore favoured any device in the 
plants which grow in such places for obtaining 
them elsewhere. This they do as a rule by catch- 
ing insects, killing them, sucking their juices, and 
using them up as manure for manufacturing their 
own protoplasm and chlorophyll. Our pretty little 
English sundew is one of these cruel and perfidious 
plants (Fig. 10). Its leaves are round, and thickly 
covered with small red hairs, which are rather 
bulbous at the end, and very sticky. The bulbous 
expansions, in point of fact, are small red glands, 
which exude a viscid digestive liquid. When a 
small fly alights on the leaf, attracted by the smell 
of the sticky fluid, he is caught and held by its 
gummy mass; the hairs then at once bend over 
and clutch him, pouring out fresh slime at the 
same time, which very shortly envelops and di- 
gests him. In the course of a few hours the leaf 
has sucked the poor victim's juices, and used them 
up in the manufacture of its own protoplasm. 

Many other insect-eating plants exist in the 
marshy soils of other countries. One of the best- 
known is the Venus 's fly-trap of tropical or sub- 
tropical North America. In this curious plant 
the leaf is divided into two portions, one of which 




Fig. io.— Sundew. A plant 
whose leaves eat and di- 
gest insects. 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 65 

forms a jointed snare for catching insects. It is 
hinged at the middle ; and when a fly lights upon 
it, the two edges bend over upon him, and the 
bristles on the margin interlock firmly. As long 
as the insect struggles they remain tightly closed ; 
when he ceases to move, and is quite dead, they 
open once more, and set their trap afresh for an- 
other insect. A great many such carnivorous and 
insectivorous plants are now known : and in al- 
most every case they inhabit places where the 
marshy and waterlogged soil is markedly wanting 
in nitrogen compounds. Insect-eating leaves are 
thus a device to supply the plant with nitrogen 
by means of its foliage, in circumstances where 
the roots prove powerless for that purpose. 

Simpler forms of the same sort of habit may 
be seen in many other familiar plants. Thus our 
English catchflies and several other of our com- 
mon weeds have sticky glandular stems, which 
exude a viscid secretion, by whose aid they catch 
and digest flies. This is the beginning of the in- 
sect-eating habit, more fully evolved by natural 
selection in marsh-plants like sundew, and espe- 
cially in larger subtropical types like the Venus's 
fly-trap. If you collect English wild-flowers you 
will soon perceive that a great many of them have 
sticky glands on the summit of the stem, near the 
flowering heads ; and this is useful to them, be- 
cause the flowers and seeds are particularly in 
want of nitrogenous matter for the pollen and 
ovules and the development of the seed. In short, 
though plants get their nitrogen mainly by means 
of the roots, they often lay in a supplementary 
store by their stems and their foliage. 

Our common English teasel shows us the be- 
ginnings of another form of insect-eating, which 
5 



66 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

is highly developed in certain American and Asi- 
atic marsh-plants. The leaves of teasel grow op- 
posite one another, joining the stem at the base, 
so as to form between them a sort of cup or basin, 
which will hold water. If you look close into this 
water you will find that it is often full of dead 
midges and ants ; and the plant puts forth long 
strings of living protoplasm into the water, which 
suck up the decaying juices of these insects, and 
use them for the manufacture of more protoplasm 
and chlorophyll. In this case, water is used both 
as a trap and as a solvent ; the insects are first 
drowned in the moat, and then allowed to decay 
and digest themselves in it. 

Teasel, however, is but a simple example of 
this method of insect-catching. Several American 
marsh-dwellers, collectively known as pitcher- 
plants, carry the same device a great deal further. 
They are far more advanced and developed water- 
trap setters. The Canadian side-saddle plant allures 
insects into its vase-shaped leaves, which are filled 
with sugar and water. This is just the same plan 
which we ourselves employ to catch flies when we 
trap them in a glass vessel by means of a sweet- 
ened and sticky liquid. The pitchers are formed 
by leaves which join at the edges ; they are at- 
tractively coloured, so as to allure the flies ; and 
they secrete on their walls a honeyed liquid, which 
entices the victim to venture further and further 
down the fatal path. But the inner sides of the 
vase are set with stiff downward-pointing hairs, 
which make it easy to go on, but impossible to 
crawl back again. So the flies creep down, eating 
away at the sticky sweet-stuff as they go, till they 
reach the bottom and the hungry water, when they 
fall in by hundreds, and are drowned and digested. 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 67 

I have found these plants often by the sides of 
Canadian bogs, with a whole seething mass of 
festering and decaying insects filling up every 




Fig. 11. — An Australian pitcher plant which eats insects. 

one of their murderous vases. Other pitcher- 
plants are found in Australia (Fig. n). 

The Nepenthes of the Malayan Archipelago is 
a still more remarkable water-trap insect-eater, in 
which the pitcher is formed by a curious jug-like 



68 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

prolongation at the end of the leaf (Fig. 12). It 
is provided with a lid, and its rim secretes a sticky 
sweet liquid. Insects that enter the jug are pre- 
vented from escaping by strong recurved hooks ; 
and these hooks are so powerful that at times they 
have been known even to capture small birds which 
had incautiously entered. This may seem curious, 
but it is not odder than the fact that our own Eng- 
lish bladderwort, a water plant with pretty yellow 
flowers, which grows in sluggish streams, has sub- 
merged bladders that supply it with manure, not 
only from water-beetles, larvae, and other inse'cts, 
but also from trout and other young fry of fresh- 
water fishes. I may add that while the sundew 
and other live-insect catchers have to digest their 
prey, the water-trap makers save themselves that 
additional trouble and expense by macerating and 
soaking it till it reaches the condition of a liquid 
manure, ready dissolved for absorption, and easy 
to assimilate. 

Thus we see that while roots are the chief or- 
gans for absorbing nitrogenous matter, they are 
often supplemented in special circumstances by 
leaves and stems. Moreover, in many cases leaves 
also supply the plant with water. On the other 
hand, roots often fulfil yet another function, by 
storing up food for the plant from one season to 
another. It is true this is still more often done 
by underground stems, but the distinction between 
the two is very technical, and I do not think I 
need trouble you here with it. Large trees with 
solid trunks usually lay by their starch and other 
valuable materials over winter in a peculiar living 
layer of the bark ; and here it is on the whole 
fairly free from danger. Still, even in trees the 




Fig. 12. — Insect-eating pitchers of the Malayan nepenthes. 



70 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

lower part of the bark is often nibbled by such 
animals as rabbits ; and to prevent this mischance 
most smaller plants bury their rich food-stuffs 
underground during the cold season. For what- 
ever will feed a young plant or a growing shoot 
will also just equally feed an animal. Hence the 
frequency with which plants make hoards of their 
collected food-stuffs underground, for use next 
season. The potato is a well-known instance of 
such underground hoards ; the plant lays by in 
what are technically subterranean branches a sup- 
ply of food-stuff for next season's growth. These 
branches are covered with undeveloped buds, 
which the farmer calls "eyes"; and from each of 
these eyes (if the potato is left undisturbed, as 
nature meant it to be) a branch or stem will start 
afresh next season. It will use up the starch and 
other foodstuffs in the potato, till it reaches the 
light ; and there it will begin to develop green 
chlorophyll, and to make fresh starch for itself, 
and young leaves and branches. 

An immense number of plants thus lay by 
underground stores of food for next season's use. 
Such are the carrot, the beet, and the turnip. And 
in every case the young shoots that spring from 
them use up the starches and other food-stuffs at 
first exactly as an animal would do. These stores 
are often protected against animals by hard coats 
of poisonous juices. Many well-known examples 
of subterranean stores occur among our spring 
garden flowers, which are for the most part either 
bulbous or tuberous. The material laid by in the 
bulb allows them to start flowering early, while 
annuals and other unthrifty plants have to wait 
till they have collected enough material in the 
same year to flower upon. Hyacinths, tulips, 



HOW PLANTS DRINK. 71 

daffodils, snowdrops, crocuses, and the various 
kinds of squills and jonquils are familiar ex- 
amples of plants which lay by in one year ma- 
terial for the next year's flowering season. But 
our wild flowers do the same thing quite as much, 
though less obtrusively. Our earliest spring but- 
tercup is the bulbous buttercup, which has a 
swollen root-stock, full of rich material; and 
this enables it to flower very soon indeed, while 
the fibrous - rooted meadow - buttercup, which 
closely resembles it in most other respects, has 
to wait a month later, and then to raise a much 
taller stem, in order to overtop the summer 
grasses, which by that time have reached a con- 
siderable height. Still earlier, however, is an- 
other buttercup-like plant, the lesser celandine, 
which has material laid by in little pill-like tubers; 
and these have given it its curious old English 
name of pilewort. Other early spring wild- 
flowers are the wood anemone and marsh-mari- 
gold, with rich and thick almost tuberous root- 
stocks ; the bulbous wild hyacinth, the tuberous 
meadow orchid, and the common arum, or " lords 
and ladies," with its starchy root, very rich in 
food-stuffs. Indeed, in every case where a plant 
flowers very early in spring, you may be sure the 
material for its flowering was laid up by the plant 
in the previous year — that it is really rather a 
case of delayed than of very early flowering. 

This is especially true of trees, like the black- 
thorn or the flowering almond, where the flower- 
buds are usually formed over winter, and only 
fully developed in the succeeding spring. The 
same thing happens with gorse ; only here, a few 
bushes always break into bloom in October or 
November, while others burst spasmodically into 



72 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

blossom whenever a warm and sunny spell occurs 
in January or February. The remaining bushes 
are covered through the winter with hairy brown 
buds, and burst out in early spring into golden 
masses of scented blossom. A like arrangement 
also occurs in many catkins, which are the flowers 
of certain trees ; the catkins of the birch and the 
alder, for example, are always formed in early 
autumn, though they only break into bloom with 
recurring warmth in March or April. 

We have travelled away so far from our origi- 
nal question of How plants drink, that a sum- 
mary of this chapter is even more necessary than 
usual. 

Plants drink by means of roots. But they 
take up by them, not only water, which is their 
needful solvent, but also other materials urgently 
required for their growth and development. The 
most important of these materials is certainly 
nitrogen, which forms an indispensable compo- 
nent of protoplasm and chlorophyll. Where, how- 
ever, the roots do not supply nitrogenous matter 
in sufficient quantities, plants procure it for them- 
selves by means of their leaves or stems, and 
therefore become insect-eating or flesh-eating. 
Soils get exhausted at times of nitrates, phos- 
phates, and other necessary materials of plant- 
life. The farmer meets this difficulty by manur- 
ing, and by rotation of crops. Nature meets it 
by dispersion of seeds. Roots, however, have 
other functions besides drinking water and suck- 
ing up with it certain dissolved materials; the 
chief of these other functions are fixing the plant 
securely in the ground, and affording a safe place 
of winter storage for starches and other surplus 



HOW PLANTS MARRY. 73 

food-stuffs. Many plants die down almost en- 
tirely, above ground, in winter, and keep their 
raw material in underground reservoirs, most of 
which are stem-like rather than root-like. Ani- 
mals, however, find out these subterranean re- 
serves, and prey upon them ; hence the plants 
often secure their hoard by nauseous tastes or 
other protective devices. 



CHAPTER VI. 

HOW PLANTS MARRY. 

We next come to what is perhaps the most 
fascinating chapter of all in the life-history of 
plants — the chapter which tells us how they marry 
and are given in marriage. 

In order that you may fully understand this 
curious and delightful subject, however, I shall 
have to begin by telling you a few preliminary 
points less interesting in themselves, and, I fear, 
at times not a little troublesome. 

Flowers are the husbands and wives of plants. 
And in some plants the sexes are as fully sepa- 
rated as in birds or beasts ; when once you know 
them, you can distinguish at sight a male from a 
female flower as readily as you can distinguish a 
bull from a cow, or a peacock from a peahen (Fig. 
13). But in other cases the sexes are muddled up 
in the same blossom or on the same plant in a 
way that makes it rather difficult to understand 
their true nature without a little pains and some 
close attention. 

So we must go back a bit for light to the lower 
plants. Here we find no flowers at all, and in 



74 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 




Fig. 13.— A, male, and B, female flower 
of a sedge, much magnified. The 
sexes are here quite distinct and un- 
like. 



the very lowest cases of any nothing in the least 
resembling a blossom. Very simple plants, in fact, 

have two ways of 
reproducing. The 
earliest way is, 
when a single cell 
divides in the mid- 
dle, to form two 
others; a some- 
what less primi- 
tive way is when a 
single cell breaks 
suddenly up, and 
produces from it- 
self a whole swarm 
of young ones. In 
both these ways, 
however, there is 
no trace of sex j only one single cell is concerned 
in the process ; the plants have a mother, perhaps, 
but certainly not a father. 

The thread-like pond-weeds, however, which 
are slightly higher plants in the scale of being 
than the single-celled floating types, show us the 
first beginnings of something like plant-marriage. 
These hair-like little weeds consist each of a single 
thread or string of cells, placed end on end to- 
gether, like beads or pearls in a necklet, and con- 
taining green chlorophyll. You can find them in 
almost any stagnant pond in spring, where they 
cling to the side in soft greenish moss-like or vel- 
vety masses. But if you examine one slimy string 
under a microscope, you will see a curious thing 
often happening between the threads of two such 
hair-like plants. As they grow side by side, two 
of the strings will sometimes range themselves 



HOW PLANTS MARRY. 



75 



just parallel to one another, with their cells facing 
(Fig. 14). Then each opposite pair of cells begins 
to bulge a little at the point where they nearly 
touch (a and b in the figure), till at last they join 
and coalesce with one another (c and d in the fig- 
ure). The contents of one cell pass into another 
(at e), and the two form a sort of egg (/), which 
lies quiet for a while, and then buds out into a 
new thread or hair-like plant by division. In this 
strange process we have the beginning of sex — 
the first hint of plant and animal marriages. 

What is the meaning and good of it ? Why do 
the plants act thus? That question we don't yet 
quite understand, perhaps ; but this seems to be 
in part at least its reason. Proto- 
plasm requires to be kept, as it 
were, perpetually young and ever 
fresh; it cannot afford to lose its 
elasticity and its plasticity. If it 
does, it grows old in time and dies. 
To prevent this misfortune, and 
the death of all things, plants and 
animals have invented all sorts of 
curious expedients; for example, 
the protoplasm of a living cell 
sometimes breaks out of the cell- 
wall, and undergoes a process which 
is called " rejuvenescence," ox grow- 
ing young again. It lies quiet for 
awhile in its free condition, and 
then begins to build up a new wall 
afresh for itself. It seems by the process of 
breaking out to have gained for itself a new lease 
of life, as we ourselves often do by a trip abroad 
or change of sea and air and occupation. How- 
ever this may be, it is certain at least that the 




Fig. 14.— Begin- 
nings of sex in 
a pond weed, 
very much mag- 
nified. 



)6 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

union of two cells often produces a fresher, 
stronger, and more vigorous young one than can 
be produced by mere division of a single cell. 
In some way or other, when a plant or animal 
reaches maturity, and arrives at the limit of its 
own growth, it produces stronger and livelier 
young by so combining with another of its own 
species. 

In the thread-like pond-weeds the two uniting 
cells are practically similar. They are not dis- 
tinguished as male and female. Neither of them 
is larger or smaller than the other; neither of 
them is more active or more vigorous than its 
consort. But in the higher plants a marked dif- 
ference invariably exists between the two cells 
that join to form the new individual — a difference 
of kind ; we have sex now appearing. One of 
the cells is smaller, and more active; it is called 
a male cell or pollen-cell. The other is larger, 
richer, and more passive; it is called a female cell y 
or ovule — that is to say in plain English, a little 
tgg. Now the nature of the ovule is such that it 
cannot grow out into a seed or young plant till it 
has been united with and fertilised by the smaller 
but more active and lively pollen-cell. 

Separate organs in the higher plants always 
produce the pollen-grain and the ovule. These 
organs are known as stamens and pistils (Fig. 
15). They are really separate individuals, or 
males and females. The stamen is the father of 
the seed, so to speak, and the pistil its mother. 

This is a hard saying, I know, and, in order 
that you may understand it, I must begin by tell- 
ing you another point about the plant which I 
have hitherto to some extent studiously con- 
cealed from you. It is this — each higher plant is 



HOW PLANTS MARRY. 



77 




not so much a single individual as a community 
or colony. 

A hive of bees will help you to understand 
this difficult paradox. I know it is difficult ; but, 
if only you will face it, it will throw floods of 
light in due time on parts of our subject we must 
consider hereafter. 
So let us look at it 
close. A hive is a 
community. It con- 
sists for the most 
part of workers, 
who are practically 
neither male nor fe- 
male. They are 
neuters, as we say ; 
and their main work 
is to find food for 
the whole hive, in- 
cluding themselves 
and the grubs or 

larvae which are the young of the species. But, in 
addition to these workers, the hive has a queen, 
who is the only perfect female, or mother, and who 
lays the eggs from which the larvae are produced ; 
and it has also several drones, who are the males 
of the community, and fathers of the larvae. Thus 
we have a colony or city, as it were, consisting of 
a few males, a single female, and a whole body of 
worker or feeder neuters. 

Now, a higher plant, like a cherry-tree (to 
take a particular example), is just such a colony 
or joint community. The leaves, each of which 
is a distinct and almost self-supporting individual, 
are its workers and feeders. Like the worker 
bees, too, the leaves are neuters — neither true 



Fig. 15. — A flower, with its petals re- 
moved. Outside are five stamens, 
which produce pollen : in the centre 
is the pistil, which contains the 
ovules or young seeds. 



78 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

males nor true females. They feed and lay by, 
and from them new leaves are continually pro- 
duced in the buds and at the ends of branches. 
This is called the sexless method of reproduction, 
and it is essentially similar to the way in which 
the single-celled plant or the simple animal di- 
vides itself sexlessly into two or more little plant- 
lets or animals. But, in addition to this sexless 
way, the plant also at certain times produces 
other sorts of leaves which are sexual individuals, 
and these we call, in the lump, flowers. But 
flowers are not all alike throughout. They con- 
sist of certain male individuals, the stamens, which 
answer to the drones, and of certain female indi- 
viduals, the pistils or carpels, which answer to the 
queen or mother bee, and produce the ovules or 
little eggs of the family. A cherry-tree is thus a 
plant-hive or colony, consisting for the most part 
of workers or leaves, but also at certain times of 
year producing male and female members, whose 
business it is to found fresh swarms, as it were — 
to produce the seeds which are the basis and 
foundation of new colonies. 

There is of course one great difference be- 
tween a hive and a plant, and that is that in the 
hive the individuals are separate and distinct, 
while in the plant they are combined on a single 
stem, which serves to join them. In this respect 
plants are more like a branch of coral, which con- 
sists of a number of distinct animals or polypes, 
united by a core of stony material, and a living 
mass of connecting matter. Yet the difference 
between the leaves and the bees is not so great 
as at first sight appears; for though each leaf 
does not as a rule live separately, it is often 
capable of doing so if occasion arises. A single 



HOW PLANTS MARRY. 79 

leaf of stonecrop, separated from the parent 
plant, will root itself and grow into a fresh 
colony ; and in some plants, like begonias, a 
single fragment of a leaf, if placed on wet soil, is 
capable of growing out into a new individual. 
In other cases small leaves drop off from a plant 
as bulbils, and root and grow ; while in others, 
again, young plants sprout out from the edges 
of old leaves to form new colonies. In short, 
though the leaf is not usually a distinct plant, 
it sometimes is, and it can often become one ; it 
frequently gives rise in a sexless way to fresh 
plant colonies. A graver difficulty is this : the 
plant differs from the hive in being more closely 
connected and subordinated in its parts — the 
stem and root (which bind and unite it), bringing 
water and nitrogenous matter, while the leaves 
elaborate the starch and protoplasm and other 
chief food-stuffs. Even this difference, however, 
is less grave than it seems, if we remember that 
the queen bee and the larvae are similarly depend- 
ent upon the workers for food and protection. 
A plant, in short, is a colony of various forms of 
leaves, very closely united together for mutual 
service, and very much specialised in various 
ways among themselves for particular functions. 

And now we are in a position to know what 
work the flower has to do in the community. It 
is a collection of special and peculiar leaves, told 
off to act as fathers and mothers to the seeds, 
whence are to be born future plant swarms or 
future colonies. 

A flower, in its simplest form, consists of a 
single stamen or a single carpel — that is to say, 
of one leaf or leaf-like organ, told off for the pro- 



80 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

duction of pollen ; or of one leaf or leaf-like or- 
gan, told off for the production of young seeds 
or ovules. Flowers as simple as that do actually 
occur, but more often a flower is much more com- 
plex, consisting of several stamens and several 
carpels, as well as of other protective or attract- 
ive leaves, often highly coloured and conspicu- 
ous, which surround or envelop these essential 
organs. 

The most familiar flowers, as we actually know 
them, are of this last more complex type; each 
comprises in itself several male and several female 
individuals. The male individuals are stamens, each 
of which generally consists of two little pollen- 
bags, called the anthers, and a rather slender stalk 
or support, known as the filament. The female 
individuals are carpels, each of which generally 
consists of a sort of sack or folded leaf, enclosing 
one or more tiny seeds or ovules. 

But that is not at all what you mean by a 
flower ! No ; certainly not ; and half the flowers 
you meet in a morning's walk you do not take 
for flowers at all, and pass by unrecognised. 
Such are the green or inconspicuous blossoms of 
the grasses, nettles, oaks, and sedges, as well as 
those of the pines, the dog's mercury, the spurge, 
and the hazel. What you mean most by a flower 
is a mass of red or yellow petals, conspicuously 
arranged about the true floral organs. The pet- 
als form, in point of fact, the popular notion of 
a flower — though from the point of view of science 
they are comparatively unimportant, and are 
commonly spoken of (with the calyx) as "the 
floral envelopes." It is the stamens and pistils 
(or carpels) that are the true flowers ; they do the 
mass of the real work ; and an enormous number 



HOW PLANTS MARRY. 



8l 



of flowers possess these organs alone, without 
any conspicuous petals or other coloured sur- 
faces. 

However, if you take a pretty garden flower 
(say a scarlet geranium) as a typical example, 
and begin to examine it from the centre outward 
(which is the truest 
way), you will find 
it consists of the 
following parts, in 
the following or- 
der : — 

In the very cen- 
tre of all comes the 
pistil, consisting of 
one or more carpels, 
and containing the 
embryo seeds or 
ovules (see Fig. 15). 
Outside this part, 
and next in order, 
come the stamens, 
which are most of- 
ten three or six in 
one great group 
of flowering plants 
(the lilies), and five, 
ten, or more in the 
other (the roses and 
buttercups). The 
stamens produce 
grains of pollen 
which somehow or other, either by means of the 
wind, or of insects, or of movements on the part 
of the plant itself, are sooner or later applied to 
the sensitive surface or stigma of the pistil. As 
6 




Fig. 16. — Grains of pollen, very much 
magnified, sending out pollen-tubes. 



82 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



soon as a pollen-grain reaches the surface of the 
stigma, it is held there by a sticky secretion, and 
instantly begins to send out what is called Apollen- 
tube (Fig. 1 6). This pollen-tube makes its way 
down the long stem or style which joins the stigma 
to the ovary, and there comes in contact with the 
undeveloped ovules. The ovules would not swell 
and grow into seeds of themselves; but the mo- 
ment the pollen-tube reaches them, they quicken 




Fig. 17. — Flower of a shrubbery plant, Weigelia, with the petals 
united into single corolla. I, entire flower ; II, the same, with 
part of the corolla cut away ; III and IV, a stamen : k, calyx ; 
6, corolla ; s, stamen ; a, anther of the stamen ; g and », parts 
of the pistil. 



into life, and begin to develop into fertile seeds. 
Unfertilised ovules wither away or come to noth- 
ing, but fertilisation by pollen makes them de- 
velop at once into new plant colonies. 

Outside these essential organs, as botanists call 
them, however, come, in handsome garden flowers, 
two other sets of organs, more leaf-like in appear- 
ance, but often brightly or conspicuously col- 



HOW PLANTS MARRY. 83 

oured. The first of these sets of organs, going 
still from within outward, is called the petals, or, 
collectively, the corolla. Sometimes, as in the 
dog-rose or the buttercup, the corolla consists of 
five separate petals ; sometimes, as in the harebell 
and the gentian, it has five points, or lobes, united 
at the base into a single piece (Fig. 17). Last of 
all, outside the corolla again comes another row 
or layer, called the calyx, which sometimes con- 
sists of five separate leaves or sepals, as in the 
dog-rose and the buttercup, but sometimes has 
five points, welded at the base into one piece, as 
in red campion and convolvulus. It is these last 
comparatively unessential but very conspicuous 
parts that most people think of when they say 
11 a flower." 

What is their, use? Well, they are not essen- 
tial, like the pistil and stamens, because many 
flowers, perhaps even most flowers, do without 
them altogether. But they are very useful for 
all that, as we may easily guess, because they are 
found in almost all the most advanced and devel- 
oped flowers. The use of the corolla, with its bril- 
liantly coloured petals, is to attract insects to the 
flowers and induce them to carry pollen from 
plant to plant. That is why they are painted red 
and blue and yellow; they are there as advertise- 
ments to tell the bee or butterfly, " Here you can 
get good honey." The use of the calyx is usually 
to cover up the flower in the bud, to keep it safe 
from cold, and to protect it from the attacks of 
insect enemies, who .often try to break through 
and steal the half-developed pollen in the bags of 
the stamens before it is ripe and ready for fer- 
tilising. These are the chief uses of the calyx or 



84 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

outer cup of the flower ; but, as we shall see here- 
after, it serves many other useful purposes from 
time to time in various kinds of flowers. In the 
fuchsia, for example, it is quite as brilliantly col- 
oured as the petals of the corolla, and supple- 
ments them in the work of attracting insects. In 
the winter cherry or Cape gooseberry it forms a 
brilliant outer envelope or covering for the fruit, 
which the French call " cerise en chemise," or 
"cherry in its nightdress." Other uses of both 
calyx and corolla will come out by and by, as we 
proceed to examine individual instances. 

" But why," you may ask, " do the plants want 
to get pollen carried from plant to plant ? Why 
can't each flower fertilise itself by letting its pol- 
len fall upon its own pistil ? " Well, the question 
is a natural one; and, indeed, many flowers do 
actually so fertilise themselves with their own 
pollen. But such flowers are almost always poor 
and degenerate kinds, the unsuccessful in the 
race, the outcasts and street arabs of plant civili- 
sation. All the higher, nobler, and more domi- 
nant plants — the plants that have carved out for 
themselves great careers in the world, and that 
occupy the best posts in nature — have invented 
some mode or other of cross-fertilisation, as it is 
called, that is to say some plan by which the pol- 
len of one plant or flower fertilises the pistil of 
another. 

What does this mean ? Well, regarding the 
plant as a colony, you will see at once that the 
stamens and pistil of the same blossom stand to 
one another somewhat in the relation of brothers 
and sisters, while those of different flowers on the 
same plant may be regarded at least in the light 
of first cousins. Now the very same thing that 



HOW PLANTS MARRY. 85 

makes sex and marriage desirable, makes close 
intermarriage of blood relations undesirable. 
" Marrying in and in," as it is called, tends to 
produce weak and feeble offspring, while " an in- 
fusion of fresh blood " tends to make both plants 
and animals stronger and more vigorous. Hence, 
if any habit chanced to arise in plants which fa- 
voured or rendered easier such cross-fertilisation,- 
it would result in stronger and more vigorous 
young, and would therefore be fixed by natural 
selection. The actual consequence is that in 
the world of plants, as we see it to-day, every 
great dominant or successful race has invented 
some means of cross-fertilisation, either by the 
agency of wind or of insects, while only the mis- 
erable riff-raff and outcasts of plant-life still ad- 
here to the old and bad method of fertilisation by 
means of the pollen of their own flowers. 

We are now in a position to understand the 
main principles which govern the marriage cus- 
toms of plants ; we will proceed in the next chap- 
ter to consider in detail how these principles work 
out in particular instances. But first we must sum 
up what we have learnt in this chapter. 

Plants marry and are given in marriage. The 
very lowest plants, indeed, are sexless, but in the 
higher there are well-marked distinctions of male 
and female. An intermediate stage exists in cer- 
tain thread-like pond-weeds, where marriage or 
intermixture takes place between two adjacent 
cells, neither of which is male or female. The 
higher plants, however, are really communities or 
colonies, of which the leaves are the workers, and 
the various parts of the flower the males and 
females. The central part of the flower, known 



86 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

as the pistil, is the female individual ; it produces 
ovules, or young seeds, which, however, cannot 
grow and swell without the quickening aid of pol- 
len. The next row 7 in the flower, known as the 
stamens, contains the male individuals; they pro- 
duce pollen, which lights on the sensitive surface 
of the pistil, sends out tubes of very active living 
matter, and quickens or impregnates the ovules 
in the pistil. Besides these necessary organs flow- 
ers have often two other sets of parts. The co- 
rolla, which is made up of petals, united or dis- 
tinct, is usually brightly coloured, and acts as an 
advertisement or allurement to the insects; it oc- 
curs chiefly in insect-fertilised flowers, and gener- 
ally implies the presence of honey. The calyx or 
outer cup, which is made up of sepals, distinct or 
united, acts mainly as a protective covering. 
Plants can fertilise themselves if necessary, but 
in all the highest and most successful plants some 
form or other of cross-fertilisation has become 
almost universal. Self-fertilisation goes down the 
hill ; cross-fertilisation is the road to success and 
vigour. 



CHAPTER VII. 

VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 

The simplest and earliest flowering plants 
had probably only three sets of organs — leaves, 
stamens, and pistils — workers, males, and females. 
Their flowers consisted at best of the necessary 
organs, enclosed, perhaps, in a few protective 
sheathing leaves, rather smaller than the rest, 
the forerunners of a calyx. How, then, did mod- 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 87 

ern flowers come to get at last their brilliant 
corollas ? 

We must remember that anything which made 
flying insects visit plants would be of use to the 
flowers, as promoting cross-fertilisation. Now, as 
far as we can see at present, before flying insects 
were evolved in the animal world, there could 
have been no such things as bright-hued blossoms 
in the vegetable kingdom. But insects must very 
early have gone about eating pollen on plants, as 
they do to this day in many instances ; and though 
in itself this would be a loss to the plant, yet 
plants have often found it well worth their while 
to pay blackmail to insects in return for some 
benefit incidentally conferred upon them. Again, 
as the insects flew from plant to plant, they would 
be sure to carry pollen on their heads and legs ; 
and they would rub off this pollen on the sticky 
stigma of the next flower they visited, which 
would make them on the whole useful and profit- 
able visitors. So the plants, finding the good 
cross-fertilisation did them, began in time to bribe 
the insects by producing honey in the neighbour- 
hood of their pistils and stamens, and also to at- 
tract their eyes from afar by means of those allur- 
ing and brilliantly-coloured advertisements which 
we call petals. 

I don't mean, of course, that the plants knew 
they were doing all this; they were unconscious 
agents. Whenever any variation in the right di- 
rection occurred by chance, natural selection im- 
mediately favoured it, so that in the end it comes 
almost to the same thing as if the plant deliber- 
ately intended to allure the insect ; and for brev- 
ity's sake I shall often so word things. 

How did the plant first come to develop such 



88 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

bright-hued petals ? I think in this way. Most 
early types of flowers have a great many stamens 
apiece, and these stamens are so extremely nu- 
merous that one or two of them might readily be 
spared for any other purpose the plant found use- 
ful. Gradually, as botanists imagine, an outer 
row of these stamens got flattened out into a form 
like foliage leaves, only without any ribs or veins 
to speak of, and developed bright colours to at- 
tract the insects. Such a flattened and gaily- 
decked stamen, with no pollen-bearing bag, is 
what we call a petal. It is usually expanded, 
thin, and spongy, and it is admirably adapted for 
the display of bright colours. 

We have still certain flowers among us which 
show us pretty clearly how this change took place. 
The common white water-lily is one of them. In 
the centre of the blossom, in that beautiful plant, 
we find a large pistil and numerous stamens of 
the ordinary sort, with round stalks or filaments, 
and yellow pollen-bags hanging out at their ends. 
Then, as we move forward, we find the filaments 
or stalks growing flatter and broader, and the 
pollen-bags gradually less and less perfect. Next 
we come to a few very flat and broad stamens, 
looking just like petals, but with two empty pol- 
len-bags, or sometimes only one, stuck awk- 
wardly on their edges. Last of all we arrive at 
true petals without a trace in any way of pollen- 
bags. I believe the water-lily preserves for us 
still some memory of the plan by which petals 
were first invented. Such relics of old conditions 
are common both in plants and animals; they 
help us greatly to reconstruct the history of the 
path by which the various kinds have reached 
their present perfection. 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 89 

Even in our own day, in plants where stamens 
are numerous, they often tend to develop into 
petals, especially when growing in very rich soil, 
or under cultivation. This is what we call " doub- 
ling " a flower. In the double rose, for example, 
the extra petals are produced from the stamens of 
the interior, and if you examine them closely you 
will see that they often show every possible grada- 
tion and intermediate stage, from the perfect sta- 
men to the perfect petal. The same thing read- 
ily happens with buttercups, poppies, and many 
other flowers. We may take it for granted, then, 
that petals are, in essence, a single outer row of 
stamens, flattened and coloured, and set apart by 
the plant to advertise its honey to insects, and so 
induce them to visit and fertilise it. ■ 

In the largest and most familiar group of flow- 
ering plants, to which almost all the best-known 
kinds belong, the original number of petals seems 
to have been five; and we will take this number 
as regular for the present, explaining separately 
those cases where it is exceeded or diminished. 
The common ancestor of all these plants, we may 
conclude, had all its parts in rows of five. Thus 
it had five, ten, or fifteen carpels in its pistil — that 
is to say, one, two, or three rows of five carpels 
each ; it had five, ten, or fifteen stamens, it had 
five or ten petals, and it had a calyx, outside all, 
of five sepals. We will now proceed to examine 
in detail some of the many curious marriage cus- 
toms which have arisen among the group of plants 
that started with this ground-plan. 

One great family of plants which early divided 
itself from this great central stock is the family 
of the buttercups. Our common English bulbous 



90 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

buttercup is one of its best-known members. It 
is yellow in colour, a point which is common to 
most early and simple flowers, because the sta- 
mens are generally yellow, and when they devel- 
oped into petals they naturally retained at first 
their original colouring. Only later and for vari- 
ous special reasons did certain higher flowers 
come by degrees to be white, pink, red, blue, 
purple, or variegated. There is some reason to 
believe, indeed, that the various other colours 
were developed one after the other in the order 
here named, and to the present day all the sim- 
plest families of flowers remain chiefly yellow, as 
do the simpler and earlier members of more ad- 
vanced families. 

The common bulbous buttercup is thus pre- 
vailingly yellow, because it is an early and simple 
type of flower. It consists of four distinct and 
successive layers, or whorls of organs. Outside 
all comes a calyx of five sepals, which cover the 
flower in the bud, but are hardly noticeable in the 
open blossom. They also serve to keep off ants 
and other creeping insects, for which purpose they 
are turned back on the stem, and are covered 
with small hairs. " But I thought the plant 
wanted to attract insects," you will say. Yes, the 
right kind of insects, the flying types, which go 
from one flower to another of the same sort, and 
so promote due fertilisation. Flying insects, at- 
tracted by colour and shape of petals, keep to one 
brand of honey at a time; they never mix their 
liquors. But ants are drawn on by the smell of 
honey only ; they crawl up one stem after an- 
other indiscriminately, and steal the nectar which 
the plant intends for its regular winged visitors. 
Even if they do occasionally fertilise a flower, it 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 91 

will probably be with pollen of another kind, so 
that the result will be, not a perfect plant, but a 
miserable hybrid, ill adapted for any conditions. 
Hence plants usually possess advanced devices 
for keeping off ants and other climbing thieves 
from their precious honey. Hairs on the stalk 
and calyx are enough to secure this object in the 
meadow buttercup, which has a tall stem, and 
therefore is not so easily climbed ; for the hairs, 
small as they look to us, prove to the ant a per- 
fect forest of underwood. But in the early 
bulbous buttercup, which has a shorter stem, and 
the smell of whose honey is therefore more allur- 
ing to the groundling ant, this device is not alone 
sufficient ; so the calyx on opening turns down its 
separate sepals close against the stem in such a 
way as to form a sort of lobster-pot, out of which 
the creeping insect can never extricate himself. 

Inside the calyx-layer of five sepals comes 
next the corolla-layer of five petals. These petals, 
as we saw, are the attractive business advertise- 
ment of the flower ; they contain at the base of 
each a tiny honey-gland or nectary, which is cov- 
ered by a scale or small inner petal, so to speak, 
to protect it from the attacks of thievish insects. 
But when the bee or other proper fertilising agent 
arrives at the flower, he lights on the set of carpels 
in the very centre of the blossom, and proceeds to 
go straight for the little store of honey. As he does 
so, he turns gradually round all over the carpels, 
and dusts himself with pollen from the ripe sta- 
mens. 

And now we must notice another curious 
device for ensuring cross-fertilisation in many 
flowers. In the bulbous buttercup the stamens 
and carpels do not come to maturity together ; 



92 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

the stamens ripen first, and after them the 
carpels. How does this ensure cross-fertilisa- 
tion ? Why, if the bee comes to a flower in the 
first or male stage, in which the stamens are at 
their full, and discharging pollen, the sensitive 
surfaces or stigmas of the carpels will yet be 
immature, so that he cannot fertilise them with 
pollen from their own blossom. He can only 
collect there, without disbursing anything. But 
as soon as he comes to a flower in its second or 
female stage, with the carpels ripe, and their 
sensitive surfaces sticky, he will rub off some 
of the pollen he has thus collected, and so cross- 
fertilise the flower he is visiting. 

Each buttercup thus goes through two stages. 
First, its stamens ripen from without inward, till 
all have shed their pollen and withered. Then 
the carpels ripen in the same order, till all have 
been fertilised by the appropriate insect. Each 
carpel here contains a single seed, which begins 
to swell as soon as the ovary is impregnated. 

We may take it that some such flower as that 
of the bulbous buttercup represents the original 
ancestor of all the buttercup group, from which 
other kinds have varied in many directions. 
Omitting for the present all questions as to the 
fruit and seed, which we must examine at length 
in a later chapter, I will now proceed briefly to 
describe a few of these variations in the butter- 
cup family. 

The true buttercups themselves are distin- 
guished from all other members of the group by 
having a tiny scale over the nectary or honey- 
gland at the base of the petal, or at least by 
having the nectary itself as a visible pit or small 
depression. Almost all of them are yellow, though 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 93 

in other respects they differ from one another, as 
in the shape of the leaves, or in the way in which 
the sepals are turned back to form a protection 
against insects. One of the yellow buttercups, 
too, commonly called the lesser celandine, has 
varied from the rest of the race in a peculiar 
fashion ; for it has only three sepals, instead of 
five, according to the usual pattern ; while, as if 
to make up for this loss in one part, it has eight 
petals instead of five in its corolla. I merely 
mention this fact to show how many small changes 
occur in different flowers, even within the limits 
of the same family. And though most of the 
true buttercups are yellow, a few are white, such 
as our own water-crowfoot, and the alpine butter- 
cup called bachelors' buttons; while still fewer 
are red, like the turban ranunculus of our spring 
gardens. 

But besides the true buttercups, we have also 
a vast group of buttercup-like plants, descend- 
ants of the same primitive five-petalled ances- 
tor, and regarded as members of the buttercup 
order. In these we can trace some curious gra- 
dations. The little winter aconite of our gar- 
dens has this peculiarity : the petal and nectary 
have grown into a sort of tubular honeycup, much 
more attractive to greedy insects than the simple 
scale-bearing petal of the buttercups. But as this 
involves loss of expanded colour-surface, the winter 
aconite has made up for the deficiency by colour- 
ing its calyx a brilliant yellow, so as to resemble 
a corolla. Several other buttercup-like plants 
have even lost their petals altogether, and make 
coloured sepals do duty in their place. The 
marsh-marigold, for instance, is one of these ; 
what look like petals in it are really very brilliant 



94 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

yellow sepals. Moreover, as the marsh-marigold 
is such a large and handsome flower, it easily at- 
tracts insects in early spring ; and this has enabled 
it to effect an economy in the matter of its carpels 
or female organs. In the buttercups, we saw, 
these were very numerous, and each contained 
only one seed; in the marsh-marigold, on the 
other hand, they are reduced to five or ten, but 
each contains a large number of seeds. This 
arrangement enables a few acts of fertilisation 
to suffice for the whole flower. You will there- 
fore find as a rule that advanced types of flowers 
have very few carpels — sometimes only one — and 
that when they are more numerous they are often 
combined into a single ovary, with one sensitive 
surface, so that one fertilisation is enough for the 
whole of them. 

Three familiar but highly-advanced members 
of the buttercup group will serve to show the im- 
mense changes effected in this respect by special 
insect fertilisation. They are the columbine, the 
larkspur, and the monkshood. In the simple but- 
tercups, the honey, we saw, was easily acces- 
sible to many small insects; but in the winter 
aconite it was made more secure by being kept, 
as it were, in a sort of deep jar ; and in these high- 
est of the family it is still further hidden away, in 
special nooks and recesses, like vases or pitchers, 
so as to be only procurable by bees and butter- 
flies. These higher insects, on the other hand, 
are the safest fertilisers, because they have legs 
and a proboscis exactly adapted to the work they 
are meant for; and they have also as a rule a 
taste for red, blue, and purple flowers, rather 
than for simple white or yellow ones. Hence 
the blossoms that specially lay themselves out 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 95 

for the higher insects are almost always blue or 
purple. 

Columbine still retains the original five sepals 
and five petals of its buttercup ancestor. But the 
sepals here are blue or purple, and are displayed 
between the petals in a most curious manner, so 
as to help in the coloured advertisement of the 
honey. The petals, on the other hand, are turned 
into long spurred horns, each with a big drop of 
honey in its furthest recess, securely placed where 
only an insect with a very long proboscis has any 
chance of reaching it. Within these two rows 
come the numerous stamens; and within them 
again a set of five carpels, each many-seeded. 
The columbine is so secure of getting its seed set 
by bees or butterflies that it is able to dispense 
with the extra carpels. 

Larkspur carries the same devices one step 
further. Here, there are five sepals, coloured blue, 
and prolonged into a spur at the base, which cov- 
ers the nectaries. Why this outer covering ? Well, 
in columbine, thievish insects like wasps often eat 
through the base of the spurred sepals and steal 
the honey, without benefiting the plant in any way, 
as they don't come near the stamens and carpels. 
Larkspur provides against that evil chance by 
covering its honey with two protective coats ; for 
within the spur of the sepals lies a spurred nectary 
made up of the petals. The petals themselves are 
reduced to two, because the sepals are coloured, 
and do all the attractive duty; and besides, even 
these two petals are combined into one, as a fur- 
ther economy. But the arrangement of the flower 
is so admirable for ensuring fertilisation that the 
plant is able still further to dispense with unneces- 
sary parts ; so many larkspurs have only a single 



96 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

many-seeded carpel. Such reductions in the num- 
bers of parts are always a sign of high develop- 
ment. Where the devices for effecting the work 
are poor, many servants are necessary ; where 
labour-saving improvements have been largely in- 
troduced, a very few will do the same work, and 
do it better. 

Monkshood, again, is another example of the 
same tendency. Here, the one-sidedness which 
we saw in the larkspur reaches a still more ad- 
vanced development. The upper sepal is formed 
into a brilliant blue hood, and it covers two curi- 
ously shaped petals, which contain an abundant 
store of honey. This arrangement is so splendid 
for fertilisation that the plant is able largely to 
reduce its number of stamens; and though it has 
three carpels, these are combined at the base, 
thus showing the first step towards a united ovary. 

I have treated the single family of the butter- 
cups at some length, because I wished to show 
you what sort of variations on a single plan were 
common in nature. We see here a family, built 
all on one scheme, but altering its architecture 
and decoration in the most singular degree in its 
different members. The simplest kinds are cir- 
cular, symmetrical, orderly, and yellow ; the high- 
est are irregular, somewhat strangely shaped, and 
blue or purple. This is the general line of evolu- 
tion in flowers. They begin like the buttercup; 
they end like the monkshood. 

Familiar instances of round or radial flowers, 
consisting of separate petals, are the dog-rose, the 
poppy, the mallow, and the herb-Robert or wild 
geranium. Most of these have five sepals and 
five petals; but in the poppy the petals are usual- 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 97 

ly reduced to four, and the sepals to two. Again, 
a good instance of flowers with separate petals 
which have become one-sided or irregular, instead 
of circularly symmetrical, is afforded us by the 
peaflowers, which include the pea, the bean, the 
sweet-pea, the laburnum, the broom, the gorse, 
the vetch, and the lupine. This familiar family, 
known to botanists as the papilionaceous or but- 
terfly-like order (I trouble you with as few long 
names as I can, so you must forgive one or two 
occasionally), is one of the largest in the world, 
and includes a vast number of the most useful 
and also of the most ornamental species. The 
structure of the flower, which is very similar in 
them all, can be easily studied in the broom or 
the sweet-pea, plants procurable by everybody. 
There are still five petals, though two of them are 
united to form a lower portion of the flower, 
known as the keel ; then two others at the side 
are called the wings; while a broad and often 
handsomely coloured advertisement-petal at the 
top of all is called the standard. The sepals are 
often combined into a single calyx-piece, though 
as a rule the calyx still retains five lobes or teeth, 
a reminiscence of the time when it consisted of 
five distinct and separate sepals. The stamens 
are welded together into a sort of long tube; and 
the pistil is reduced to a single carpel or pod, 
containing a few big seeds, very familiar to most 
of us in the case of the pea, the bean, and the 
scarlet-runner. This shape of flower has proved 
so successful in the struggle for life that papil- 
ionaceous plants are now common everywhere, 
while hundreds of different kinds are known in 
various countries. 

Yet closely as the peaflowers resemble one 
7 



98 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

another in general aspect, they have still among 
themselves a curious variety of marriage customs. 
I will mention two only. In gorse, a flower which 
everybody can easily examine, the wings have 
two little knobs at the sides for the bee to alight 
upon. As he does so, the corolla springs open 
elastically, and dusts him all over with the fer- 
tilising pollen. But once it has burst, it remains 
permanently open, the keel hanging down in a 
woe-begone way, so that no bee troubles himself 
again to visit it. This saves time for the bees, 
and enables them quicker to fertilise the remain- 
ing flowers; for when they see a gorse-blossom 
" sprung," as we call it, they recognise at once 
that it has already been fertilised, and they know 
they can get no food by going there. In the 
lupine, on the other hand, and in the common 
little English birdsfoot-trefoil, the keel is sharp 
at the point, and the pollen is shed into it before 
the flower fully opens. When a bee lights on the 
knobs at the side, he depresses the keel, and the 
pollen is pumped out against his breast in the 
most beautiful manner. I hope my readers will 
try some of these experiments in summer for 
themselves, and satisfy their own minds whether 
these things are so. 

So far, we have dealt mainly with flowers in 
which the petals are all still distinct and separate. 
But in a great many plants, the petals have grown 
together, so as to form a single piece, a "tubular 
corolla," as we call it. This arrangement is very 
well seen in the harebell, the Canterbury bell, the 
heath, and the convolvulus. How did such an 
arrangement arise ? Well, in many flowers even 
with distinct petals there is a slight tendency for 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 99 

adjacent parts to adhere at the base; and in cer- 
tain blossoms this tendency to adhesion must 
have benefited the plant, because it would allow 
the proper fertilising insect to get in with ease, 
and to find his way at once to the stamens and 
stigma or sensitive surface. The consequence is 
that the majority of the higher plants have now 
corollas in a single piece; and most of these are 
also coloured red, blue, or purple. Still, even 
now many of them retain marks of the original 
five petals. For instance, the harebell has the 
edge of the corolla vandyked into five marked 
lobes ; while in the primrose, only the base of the 
corolla forms a tube or united pipe, the outer 
part being composed of five deeply-cut lobes, 
reminiscences of the five original petals. Indeed, 
some relations of the primrose, such as the pim- 
pernel and the woodland loose-strife, have the 
petals only slightly united at the base, and would 
hardly be noticed by a casual observer as possess- 
ing a tubular corolla. 

There is one marriage custom of the primrose, 
however, so very interesting that we must not 
pass it by even in so brief a survey. Most chil- 
dren are aware that we have in our woods two 
kinds of primroses, which they know respectively 
as pin-eyed and thrum-eyed. In the pin-eyed 
form (Fig. 18), only the little round stigma is 
visible at the top of the pipe, while the stamens, 
here joined with the corolla-tube, hang out like 
little bags half-way down the neck of it. In the 
thrum-eyed form (Fig. 19), on the other hand, 
only the stamens are visible at the top of the 
tube, while the stigma, erected on a much shorter 
style, occupies just the same place in the tube 
that the stamens occupied in the sister blossom. 



IOO 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



Now, each primrose plant bears only one form of 
flower. Therefore, if a bee begins visiting a 
thrum-eyed form, he will collect pollen on his 
proboscis at the very base only ; and as long a? 
he goes on visiting thrum-eyed flowers, he can 
only collect, without getting rid of any grains on 




Fig. 18. — Pin-eyed primrose, 
cut open so as to show the 
arrangement of the stamens 
and stigma. 



Fig. 19. — Thrum-eyed prim- 
rose, cut open so as to 
. show stamens and stigma. 



the deep-set stigmas. But when he flies away to 
a pin-eyed blossom, the part of his proboscis 
which collected pollen before will now be op- 
posite the stigma, and will fertilise it; while 
at the same time he will be gathering fresh 
pollen below, to be rubbed off on the sensitive 
surface of a short-styled flower in due season. 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. IOI 

Thus every pin-eyed blossom must always be fer- 
tilised by a thrum-eyed, and every thrum-eyed by 
a pin-eyed neighbour. This is one of the most 
ingenious arrangements known for cross-fertilisa- 
tion. 

Much as I should like to dwell further on 
these interesting cases, I must hurry on to com- 
plete our rapid survey of a great subject. Flow- 
ers like the harebell and the primrose are tubular 
but regular. Other flowers with a tubular corolla 
go yet a step further and are irregular also. This 
irregularity, like that of the monkshood, secures 
for them in the end greater certainty of fertilisa- 
tion. Two well-known groups of this sort are 
the sages, on the one hand, and the fox-gloves, 
monkey-plants, and snap-dragons on the other. 
I shall mention only one instance of special de- 
vices for cross-fertilisation in these groups, that 
of the various sages, beautifully seen in the large 
blue salvias of our gardens. In this plant there 
are only two stamens, though most of the group 
to which it belongs have four, because the ex- 
cellent arrangements for fertilisation make this 
single pair a great deal more effective than the 
thirty or forty required by the common buttercup. 
For the stamens are delicately poised on a sort 
of lever, so that the moment the bee enters the 
flower, they descend and embrace him, as if by 
magic. While the stamens alone are ripe, this 
continues to happen with each flower he visits; 
but when he goes away to an older blossom, he 
finds the stigma ripe, and bending over into the 
spot previously occupied by the stamens. You 
can try this experiment very easily for yourself 
by putting a straw or bent of grass down the 



102 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

tube of a garden salvia, when the stamens will at 
once bend down and embrace it in the way I have 
mentioned. 

You must not suppose, however, that all flow- 
ers are fertilised by bees and butterflies. Many 
plants lay themselves out for quite different vis- 
itors. Take for example our common English 
figwort. This is a curious, lurid-looking, reddish- 
brown blossom, shaped somewhat like a helmet, 
and it is fertilised almost exclusively by wasps. 
Its shape and size exactly adapt it for a wasp's 
head; and it blooms at the time of year when 
wasps are numerous. Now w r asps, as you know, 
are carnivorous and omnivorous creatures ;, so the 
figwort, to attract them, looks as meaty as it can, 
and has an odour not unlike that of decaying 
mutton. Certain tropical flowers again attract 
carrion-flies, and these have big blossoms that 
look like decomposing meat, and smell disgust- 
ingly. A South African flower of this sort, the 
Stapelia, is sometimes cultivated as a curiosity in 
greenhouses. I have already remarked on the 
white flowers which open at night, and attract the 
moths of twilight ; while others again lay them- 
selves out to be fertilised by midges, beetles, and 
other insect riff-raff. Most of these have the 
honey displayed on wide open discs, where it can 
be sipped by insects with hardly any proboscis. 

In our latitudes it is only insects that so act 
as fertilisers; but in the tropics the work of fer- 
tilisation is often performed by birds, such as 
humming-birds, sun-birds, and brush-tongued 
lories. Many of the most brilliant and beautiful 
among the bell-shaped tropical flowers have been 
specially developed to suit the tastes and habits 



VARIOUS MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 



103 



of these comparatively large and powerful ferti- 
lisers. The tongues of all, but especially of the 
humming-birds, are admirably adapted for suck- 
ing honey from flowers, as they are long and 
tubular, sometimes forked at the tip, and often 
hairy so as to lick up both honey and insects. 
The length of the beak and tongue varies to a 
great extent in accordance with the depth of the 
tube in the flowers they fertilise. Bird and flower, 
in other words, have each been developed to suit 
one another. The same sort of correspondence 
may often be observed between insects and flowers 
developed side by side for mutual convenience. 



One more point I should like to touch upon 
before I pass away from this part of the subject; 
and that is the lines or spots so often found on 
the petals of highly developed flowers. These for 
the most part act as honey-guides, to lead the bee 
or other fertilising insect direct to the nectar. A 
very good case of this may be seen in an Indian 
plant which is found in every English cottage 
garden — that is to say the so-called nasturtium. 
This blossom can only be fertilised by humble-bees 
and humming-bird hawk-moths, no other insect in 
England at least having a proboscis long enough 
to reach the bottom of the very deep spur which 
holds the honey. Now, humming-bird hawk- 
moths do not light on a flower, but hover lightly 
poised on their quivering wings in front of it. So 
all the arrangements of the flower are strictly set 
forth in accordance with the insect's habit. The 
calyx consists of five sepals with a very long spur, 
the end of which, as you can find out by biting it, 
is full of honey. Then come five petals, not, how- 
ever, all alike, but divided into two distinct sets, 



104 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

an upper pair and a lower triplet. The upper pair 
are broad and deeply-lined with dark veins, which 
all converge about the mouth of the spur, and so 
show the inquiring insect exactly where to go in 
search of honey. The lower three, on the other 
hand, have no lines or marks, but possess a curi- 
ous sort of fence running right across their face, 
intended to prevent other flying insects from 
alighting and rifling the flower without fertilising 
the ovary. This flower, too, has two successive 
stages ; it opens male, with stamens only, which 
bend upward towards the insect ; later, it becomes 
female, the stigma opens and becomes forked, and 
bends down so as to occupy the very same place 
previously occupied by the ripe stamens. 

A great many well-known flowers have such 
lines as honey-guides. If I have succeeded so far 
in interesting you in the subject, you will find it a 
pleasant task to hunt them out for yourself in the 
violet, the scarlet geranium, the spotted orchid, 
and the tiger lily. 

So far I have dealt only with the marriage ar- 
rangements of those plants which are fertilised by 
insects or birds, and which belong to the great 
group of flowering plants descended from an early 
common ancestor with five petals. We must next 
deal briefly with the marriage customs of the in- 
sect-fertilised class among the other great group 
whose ancestor started with but three petals ; and 
after that we must go on to the other mode of 
fertilisation by means of the wind or of self-im- 
pregnation. 

This chapter has consisted so much of special 
cases that I do not think it stands in the same 
need of a summary as all its predecessors. 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 105 

CHAPTER VIII. 

MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 

Almost all the flowering plants with which 
most people are familiar — all, indeed, save the 
pines and other conifers — belong to one or other 
of two great groups or alliances, each remotely 
descended from a common ancestor. The flow- 
ers we have hitherto been considering are entirely 
those which belong to one of these two groups — 
the group which started with rows of five, having 
five sepals, five petals, five or ten stamens, and 
five or ten carpels. In several cases, certain of 
these rows have been simplified or reduced in 
number ; but almost always we can see to the 
end some trace of the original fivefold arrange- 
ment. This fivefold arrangement is very con- 
spicuous in all the stonecrops, and it may also be 
well noticed in wild geraniums, and less well in 
the strawberry, the dog-rose, and the cinquefoil. 

In the present chapter, however, I propose to 
go on to sundry flowers of the other great group 
which has its parts in rows of three, and to show 
how they have been affected by insect visits. 
This will give us a clearer view of the whole 
subject, while it will also form a general intro- 
duction to systematic botany for those of my 
readers who may be induced by this book to 
carry their studies in this direction further. 

Before proceeding, however, there is one little 
point I should like to note about the fivefold 
flowers, which we shall find much more common 
in the threefold, and among the wind-fertilised 
species. This is the separation of the sexes in 



106 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

different blossoms or even on separate plants. 
All the flowers we have so far considered have 
contained both male and female portions — have 
been made up of stamens and carpels united to- 
gether in the self-same blossom. But many of 
them, as you will recollect, have not been actively 
both male and female at the same moment. The 
stamens ripened first, the sensitive surface of the 
carpels afterwards ; and this, as we saw, tended 
to promote cross-fertilisation. But if in any spe- 
cies all the stamens in certain flowers were to be 
suppressed or undeveloped, while in other flowers 
the same thing happened to the carpels, self- 
fertilisation would become an absolute impossi- 
bility, and every blossom would necessarily be 
impregnated from the pollen of a neighbour. 
Natural selection has accordingly favoured such 
an arrangement in a considerable number of the 
higher plants. In such cases some of the flowers 
consist of stamens only, with no carpels; while 
others consist of carpels alone, with no stamens. 
But as all are descended from ancestors which 
had both organs combined in the same flower, 
remnants of the stamens often exist in the female 
flowers as naked filaments or barren threads, 
while remnants of the carpels equally exist in the 
male flowers as central knobs without seeds or 
ovules. 

The beautiful begonias, so much cultivated in 
conservatories, give us an excellent example of 
such single-sex flowers. In these plants the males 
and females are extremely different. The male 
flower has four coloured and petal-like sepals, 
surrounding a number of central stamens. The 
female flower has five coloured and petal-like 
sepals, surrounding a group of daintily-twisted 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 1 07 

central stigmas, while at the base of the blossom 
is a large triangular ovary, containing the young 
seeds or ovules. Usually the flowers grow in 
little bunches of three, each bunch consisting of 
two males and one female. 

In the pumpkins, cucumbers, and melons, 
separate male and female flowers also exist on 
the same plant. The females here may be easily 
recognised by having an ovary or small- unde- 
veloped fruit at the back of the blossom, which 
you can cut across so as to show the young seeds 
or ovules within it. As the proper insects for fer- 
tilising cucumbers and melons do not live in Eng- 
land, gardeners usually impregnate the female 
flowers by bringing pollen from the males to 
them with a camel's-hair brush. This process is 
commonly known as " setting" the melons. Many 
other garden flowers have separate male and fe- 
male blossoms, which the beginner can easily rec- 
ognise for himself if he takes the trouble to look 
for them. 

In the instances we have hitherto considered, 
the male and female blossoms live on the same 
plant. But the best cross-fertilisation of all is 
that which is secured where the fathers and 
mothers belong to totally distinct plants, a plan 
for facilitating which we have already seen in the 
common primrose. Well, now, if any species took 
to producing all male flowers on one plant, and 
all females on another, this great end would be- 
come absolutely certain, for every blossom would 
then always be fertilised by the pollen brought 
from a distinct plant. Many such instances have 
accordingly been produced in the world around 
us by natural selection. Only, the two kinds of 
plants must always grow in one another's neigh- 



io8 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



bourhood. Hemp, for example, is a case of a 
plant where such an arrangement already exists; 
some plants are male only, while some are female. 
Mistletoe and hops are other well-known in- 
stances, which the reader should carefully ex- 
amine for himself at the proper season. 

All these are fivefold flowers, and I have 
brought them in here merely because one of the 
earliest and simplest threefold flowers we are 
going to consider has also this peculiarity of 
separate sexes. This is the common arrowhead, 
a plant that grows in watery ditches, and a capi- 





Fig. 20. — I, male, and II, female flowers of arrowhead. 

tal example of the threefold type in its simpler 
development. Each flower, whether male or fe- 
male, has a green calyx of three small sepals, and 
a white corolla of three much larger and some- 
what papery petals (Fig. 20). But the male 
flowers have in their centre an indefinite number 
of clustering stamens ; while the female flowers 
have an equally numerous set of tiny carpels. 
The blossoms grow in whorls on the same stem, 
the males above, the females beneath them. At 
first sight you would think this a bad arrange- 
ment, because you might fancy pollen from the 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 



males would certainly fall or blow out upon the 
females beneath them. But the plant prevents 
that catastrophe by a very simple dodge, which 
we shall have occasion to notice in many other 
parallel cases. The flowers open from below up- 
ward ; thus the females mature first, and are fer- 
tilised by insects which bring to them pollen from 
other plants already rifled ; later on the males 
follow suit, and their pollen is carried off by the 
visiting insect to the female flowers on the next 
plant it visits. Indeed, you may gather by this 
time how great a variety of devices natural selec- 
tion has produced for securing this great deside- 
ratum of fresh blood, or cross-fertilisation, from a 
totally distinct plant colony. 

A much commoner English wild-flower than 
the arrowhead shows us another form of early 
threefold blossom. I mean the water-plantain 
(Fig. 21), a pretty feath- 
ery weed, which grows by 
the side of most ponds 
and lakelets. In the wa- 
ter-plantain you have a 
flower of both sexes com- 
bined; it consists of three 
green sepals, forming a 
protective calyx ; three 
delicate pinky-white pet- 
als, forming the corolla; 
six stamens — that is to 
say, two rows of three 
each ; and a number of 
small one-seeded carpels, 

exactly as in the buttercup, which occupies, in 
fact, the corresponding place among the fivefold 
flowers. 




Fig. 21. — Flower of water- 
plantain. The male and fe- 
male parts are in the same 
blossom. 



IIO THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

But it is not often in the threefold flowers that 
we get the calyx green and the corolla coloured, 
as in these simple and very early types. Most 
often in this great group of plants the calyx and 
corolla are both brightly coloured, and both alike 
employed as effective advertisements. A good 
case of this sort is shown in the flowering-rush, 
a close relation of the arrowhead and the water- 
plantain, but a more advanced and developed 
plant than either of them. Here the calyx and 
corolla, instead of forming two separate rows, 
are telescoped into one, as it were, and are both 
rose-coloured. In such cases we speak of the 
combined calyx and corolla as the perianth (another 
long word, with which I'm sorry to trouble you). 
In such perianths, however, even when all the 
pieces are of the same size and are similarly col- 
oured, you can see if you look close that three of 
them are outside and alternate with the others ; 
and these three are really the calyx in disguise, 
got up as a corolla. (An excellent example of this 
arrangement is afforded by the common garden 
tulip.) Inside its six rose-coloured perianth-pieces, 
the flowering-rush has nine stamens, arranged in 
three rows of three stamens each. Finally, in the 
centre, it has six carpels, equally arranged in two 
rows of three. Here the threefold architectural 
ground-plan of the flower is very apparent. You 
may say, in short, that the original scheme of the 
two great groups is something like this : five 
sepals, five petals, five stamens, five carpels ; or 
else, three sepals, three petals, three stamens, 
three carpels. But in any instance there may be 
two or more such rows of any organ, especially 
of the stamens ; in any instance certain parts 
may be reduced in number or entirely suppressed ; 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. I I I 

and in any instance calyx and corolla may be 
coloured alike so as almost to resemble a single 
row or perianth. 

There is one more point about the flowering- 
rush to which I would like to allude before going 
on to the other threefold flowers, and that is this. 
In arrowhead and water-plantain the carpels are 
very numerous, but each one-seeded. In flower- 
ing-rush, on the other hand, which has a larger 
and handsomer blossom, more attractive to in- 
sects, they are reduced to six ; but these six have 
many seeds in each, so that a single act of fertili- 
sation suffices for each of them. You may re- 
member that among the fivefold flowers we found 
a precisely similar advance on the part of the 
marsh-marigold above the bulbous and meadow 
buttercups. This sort of advance is common in 
nature. Where a flower learns how to produce 
many seeds in a carpel, it can soon dispense with 
several of its carpels, because a few now do well 
what the many did badly. Furthermore, in higher 
plants, there is a tendency for these carpels to 
unite so as to form what we call a compound ovary \ 
with a single style, when one act of fertilisation 
suffices for all of them. Such combinations or 
labour-saving arrangements obviously benefit 
both the insect and the plant, and have therefore 
been doubly favoured by natural selection. 

We see this advance beautifully illustrated in 
the largest and loveliest family of the threefold 
flowers, the lily group, which contains a great 
number of the handsomest insect-fertilised blos- 
soms, and is therefore deservedly an immense 
favourite in flower-gardens. All the lilies have a 
perianth (or combined calyx and corolla) of six 
almost similar brilliantly-coloured pieces (in which, 



112 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

however, you can still, as a rule, detect the sepals 
by their habit of overlapping the petals in the 
bud). Then they have a set of six stamens. Inside 
that again they have a single .ovary, but if you 
cut it across with a penknife you will see at once 
it contains three chambers, each as a rule with 
several seeds ; and these three chambers are a 
memory of the time when the ovary consisted of 
three separate carpels. From their midst arises 
a single long style; but you may observe all the 
same that it is made up of three original and dis- 
tinct styles, because it divides at the top into three 
stigmas or sensitive surfaces. This is the general 
plan of the lily group ; but in certain individual 
lilies the stigma is undivided, and in others again 
the parts are increased to four or even to eight, so 
as to obscure the primitive threefold arrange- 
ment. 

Most of the large and handsome lilies culti- 
vated in gardens have perianths of separate pieces, 
such as one knows so well in the tiger-lily, the 
Turk's-cap lily, and the beautiful Japanese lilium 
auratum. They have also abundant honey, stored 
in a deep groove of the spotted petals, and they 
are variegated and lined in such a way as to 
guide insects direct to their store of nectar. But 
the family has been so successful with the higher 
insects, and has produced such an extraordinary 
variety of very beautiful and brilliant flowers, 
that it is quite impossible to speak of them in 
detail. A few among them, like our own wild 
hyacinth, show a slight tendency on the part of 
the petals and sepals to unite into a bell-shaped 
tube ; still, even here the pieces are really distinct 
and separate. But in the true garden hyacinth 
the pieces unite into a tubular perianth, like the 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 113 

tubular corolla of the common harebell, except 
that in the harebell the tube is formed by the 
union of the five petals, while in the hyacinth it 
is formed by the similar union of three petals and 
three sepals. A still higher form of the same 
union is shown us by the lily-of-the-valley, in 
which the six perianth-pieces join throughout to 
form a very beautiful heather-like cup or goblet. 
Other familiar members of this great lily group, 
which you ought to examine at leisure for your- 
self, in order to see how they are built up, are as- 
paragus, Solomon's seal, fritillary, tulip, star-of- 
Bethlehem, squill, garlic, onion, tuberose, and 
asphodel. The cultivated lilies of one sort or 
another to be found in our gardens may be num- 
bered by hundreds. 

A family of threefold flowers almost as beau- 
tiful as the lily group, and seldom distinguished 
from them save by botanists, is that which bears 
the pretty Greek name of amaryllids. The araa- 
ryllids are lilies which differ from the rest of their 
kind, in the fact that the perianth, still composed 
of six pieces, has grown up and around the ovary 
so as to seem to spring from above it, not below 
it. Such flowers are said to have " inferior ova- 
ries." In other respects the amaryllids closely 
resemble the lilies, having six coloured perianth- 
pieces, six stamens, and an ovary of three cham- 
bers, with one style in common. Several of the 
amaryllids are such familiar flowers that I shall 
venture to describe them as illustrative examples. 

The snowdrop is an amaryllid which blossoms 
in early spring, and which shows in a simple form 
the chief features of the family. It has six pe- 
rianth-pieces, but these are still distinctly recog- 
nisable as calyx and corolla. The three sepals 
8 



114 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

are large and pure white, and they enclose the 
petals; the three petals are distinctly smaller, and 
tipped with green in a very pretty fashion. The 
summer snowflake, commonly cultivated in old- 
fashioned gardens, is very like the snowdrop, only 
here the difference between sepals and petals has 
disappeared ; all six pieces form one apparent row, 
white, tipped with green, in a single perianth. 

In the daffodils and narcissuses we get a sec- 
ond group of amaryllids more advanced and de- 
veloped. Here the six perianth-pieces are almost 
alike, though they may still be distinguished as 
sepals and petals by a careful observer. But the 
perianth, which is tubular below, divides above 
into six lobes, beyond which it is prolonged again 
into what is called a crown, whose real nature can 
only be understood by comparison with such other 
flowers as the campions, where scales are inserted 
on the tip of the petals. This crown is compara- 
tively little developed in the narcissus and the 
jonquil ; but in the daffodil it has become by far 
the largest and most conspicuous part of the en- 
tire flower, so as completely to hide the bee who 
visits it. Of course this large crown assists fer- 
tilisation, and is a mark of advance in the daffodil 
and the petticoat narcissus. I hope these few 
remarks will induce you to examine many kinds 
of narcissus in detail, in order to see of what 
parts they are compounded. 

This seems a convenient place to interpose an- 
other remark I have long wanted to make, name- 
ly, that the threefold flowers are also for the most 
part distinguished by having those narrow grass- 
like or sword-shaped leaves, with parallel ribs or 
veins, about which I told you when we were deal- 
ing with the question of varieties of foliage. The 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 115 

fivefold flowers, on the other hand, have usually 
net-veined leaves, either feather-ribbed or finger- 
ribbed. And at the risk of using two more horrid 
long words, I shall venture to add that botanists 
usually speak of the threefold group as monocoty- 
ledons, and of the fivefold group as dicotyledons. I 
did not invent these words, and I am sorry to 
have to use them here ; but I will explain what 
they mean when I come to deal with seeds and 
seedlings. It is well at least to understand their 
use in case you come across them in your future 
reading. 

Another family of threefold flowers, closely 
allied to the amaryllids, is that of the irises, many 
examples of which are familiar in our flower-gar- 
dens. It only differs from the amaryllids, in fact, 
in having the number of stamens still further re- 
duced to three, which is always a sign of advance, 
because it shows that the plants are so sure of 
fertilisation as to be able to dispense with all 
unnecessary pollen. The ovary is also inferior, 
which you will learn in time to recognise as a 
constant sign of high development, because it 
means that the base of the corolla and calyx have 
coalesced with the carpels, and so ensured greater 
certainty of fertilisation. Some simple members 
of the iris group, like the crocuses, have mere tu- 
bular flowers, with a very long funnel-like base 
to the corolla, and with the ovary buried in the 
ground for greater safety. They are early spring 
blossoms, which need much protection against 
cold ; therefore they thus bury their ovaries, and 
sheathe their flower-buds in a papery covering, 
composed of a thin and leathery leaf. Whenever 
a sunny day comes in winter the bees venture 
out; and on all such days, even though it freeze 



Il6 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

in the shade, the crocuses are open in the sun- 
shine to welcome them. 

But other irises are more complicated, like the 
gladiolus, and still more the garden irises, in 
which the difference between the calyx and corolla 
is carried to its furthest point in this family. The 
sepals in true irises are large and brilliantly col- 
oured ; they hang over gracefully ; the petals are 
smaller and erect ; the stigmas are so expanded 
as to look like petals ; and they arch over the 
stamens in a most peculiar manner. If you watch 
a bee visiting a garden iris, you will see for your- 
self the use of this most peculiar arrangement ; 
the bee lights on the bending sepal, and inserts 
his head between the stigma and the stamen in a 
way which renders fertilisation simply inevitable. 
But the most curious part of it all is that the 
flower, from the point of view of the bee, resem- 
bles three distinct and separate blossoms ; he 
alights one after another on each bending sepal, 
and proceeds to search for honey as if in a new 
flower. 

Highest of all the threefold flowers, and most 
wonderful in their marriage customs, are the 
great group of orchids, some of which grow wild 
in our English meadows, while others fix them- 
selves by short anchoring roots on the branches 
of trees in the tropical forests. Many of these 
last produce the handsomest and most extraor- 
dinary flowers in the world, and they are much 
cultivated accordingly in hothouses and con- 
servatories. It would be quite impossible for me 
to give you any account of the infinite devices 
invented by these plants to secure insect-fertilisa- 
tion ; and even the structure of the flower is so 
extremely complex that I can hardly undertake 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 



i r 



to describe it to you intelligibly ; but I will give 
you such a brief statement of its chief peculiari- 
ties as will enable you to see how highly it has 
been specialised in adaptation to insect visits. 

The ovary in orchids is inferior, and curiously 
twisted. It supports six perianth-pieces, three 
of which are sepals, often long and very hand- 
some ; while two are petals, often arching like a 
hood over the centre of the flower. The third 
petal, called the lip, is quite different in shape 




Fig. 22. — Single flower of orchid, with the perianth cut away. The 
honey is in the spur, n ; the pollen-masses are marked a ; their 
gummy base is at r ; the stigma at st. 

and appearance from the other two, and usually 
hangs down in a very conspicuous manner. There 
are no visible stamens, to be recognised as such ; 
but the pollen is contained in a pair of tiny bags 
or sacks, close to the stigma. It is united into 
two sticky club-shaped lumps, usually called the 
pollen-masses (Fig. 22). In other words, the or- 



II 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



chids have got rid of all their stamens except one, 
and even that one has united with the stigma. 

I will only describe the mode of fertilisation of 
one of these plants, the common English spotted 
orchis; but it will suffice to show you the extreme 
ingenuity with which members of the family often 
arrange their matrimonial alliances. The spotted 
orchis has a long tube or spur at the base of its 
sepals (Fig. 22, ;/), and this spur contains abun- 
dant honey. The pollen-masses are neatly lodged 
in two little sacks or pockets near the stigma, and 
are so placed that their lower ends come against 
the bee's head as he sucks the honey. These 
lower ends (r) are gummy or viscid, and if you 
press a straw or the point of a pencil against them, 
the pollen-masses gum themselves to it naturally, 
and come readily out of their sacks as you with- 
draw the pencil (Fig. 23). In the same way, when 




£ IG. 23. — Pollen-masses of an orchid, withdrawn on a pencil. In 
I, they have just been removed. In II, they have dried and 
moved forward. 



the bee presses them with his head, the pollen- 
masses stick to it, and he carries them away with 
him as he leaves the flower. Just at first, the 
pollen-masses stand erect on his forehead ; but as 
he flies through the air, they dry and contract, so 
that they come to incline forward and outward. 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 



II 9 




By the time he reaches another plant they have 
assumed such a position that they are brought 
into contact with the stigma as he sucks the 
honey. But the stigma is gummy too, and makes 
the pollen adhere to it, and in this way cross- 
fertilisation is rendered almost 
a dead certainty. The result 
of these various clever dodges 
is that the orchids have become 
one of the dominant plant- 
families of the world, and in 
the tropics usurp many of the 
best and most favoured posi- 
tions (Fig. 24). 

Darwin has written a most 
romantic book on the numer- 
ous devices by which orchids 
alone attract insects to fertil- 
ise them. I will say no more 
of this family, therefore — the 
highest and strangest among 
the threefold flowers — save merely to advise those 
who wish to know more of this curious sub- 
ject to look it up in his charming volume. In- 
stead of pursuing the matter at issue further, I 
will give one final example in an opposite direc- 
tion. 

An opposite direction, I say, because all the 
threefold flowers we have hitherto been consider- 
ing are examples of a strict upward movement of 
evolution. Each group we have examined has 
been higher and more complex than the group 
before it. But I will now show you an instance, 
if not of degeneracy, at least of extreme simplifi- 
cation, which yet produces in the end the best 
possible results. This instance is that of the 



Fig. 24. — The two pol- 
len - masses, very 
much enlarged. 



120 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

common English arum, known to children as 
cuckoo-pint or " lords and ladies " (Fig. 25). 

The structure of the cuckoo-pint is very pe- 
culiar. What looks like the flower is not really 
any part of the flower at all, but a large outer 




Fig. 25. — The common arum, or cuckoo-pint, showing the spathe 
which surrounds the flowers, and the spike sticking up in the 
middle. 



leaf or spathe surrounding a group of very tiny 
blossoms. You can understand this leaf better 
if you look at a narcissus stalk, where a very 
similar leaf is seen to enclose a whole bunch of 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 



121 






buds and opening flowers. Only, in the narcissus 
the spathe is thin, whitish, and papery, while in 
the cuckoo-pint it is expanded, green, and purple. 
Though not a corolla, it serves the same purpose 
as a corolla generally performs : it attracts insects 
to the compound flower-head. 

Inside the spathe we find a curious club-shaped 
mass, coloured bright purple, and standing straight 
up in the middle of the head. 
This is the stem or axis on which 
the separate little flowers are ar- 
ranged. Cut open the spathe, and 
you will find these flowers below 
in the centre (Fig. 26). At first 
sight what you see will look like 
a lot of confused little knobs ; 
but when you gaze closer you 
will see they separate themselves 
into three groups, which are the 
true flowers. Lowest of all on 
the stem come the female blos- 
soms, without calyx or corolla, 
each consisting of a single ovary. 
Above these in a group come the 
male flowers, equally devoid of 
calyx or corolla, and each con- 
sisting of a single stamen. Above 
these again come abortive or mis- 
shapen flowers, each of which has 
been reduced to a single down- 
ward-pointing hair. I will ex- 
plain first what is the use of these flowers in the 
cuckoo-pint as it stands to-day, and then I will 
go back to consider by what steps the plant came 
to develop them. 

The upper flowers, which look like hairs, and 




122 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

point all downwards, occupy a place in the com- 
pound flower-head just opposite the conspicuous 
narrowed part of the spathe which surrounds and 
encloses them. At this narrow point they form a 
sort of lobster-pot. It is easy enough for an in- 
sect to creep down past them, but very difficult 
or impossible for him to creep up in the opposite 
direction, as all the hairs point sharply downwards. 
Now, when the spathe unfolds, large numbers of 
a very small midge of a particular species are at- 
tracted into it by the purple club which rises 
like a barber's pole in the middle. If you cut a 
cuckoo-pint open during its flowering period you 
will always find a whole mob of these wee flies, 
crawling about in it vaguely, and covered from 
head to foot with pollen. They have come from 
another cuckoo-pint which they previously visited, 
and they have brought the pollen with them on 
their wings and bodies. But when they first 
reach the head, they find no pollen there ; the 
female flowers at the bottom ripen first, and the 
midges, creeping over the sensitive surface of 
these, fertilise them with pollen from the last 
plant they entered. Finding nothing to eat, if 
they could they would crawl out again ; but they 
can't, for the lobster-pot hairs prevent them. So 
they stop on perforce, having unwittingly fertilised 
the female flowers, but received themselves as yet 
no reward for their trouble. By and by, how- 
ever, after all the female flowers have been duly 
fertilised, the males above begin to ripen. When 
the stamens reach maturity, they shower down a 
whole flood of golden pollen on the expectant 
midges. Then the midges positively roll and 
revel in the flood, eating all they can, but at the 
same time covering themselves all over with a 



MORE MARRIAGE CUSTOMS. 1 23 

dust of pollen-grains. As soon as the pollen is 
all shed, the downward-pointing hairs wither 
away ; the lobster-pot ceases to act ; and the 
midges are at liberty to fly away to another plant, 
where they similarly begin to fertilise the female 
flowers. Observe that, if the stamens were the 
first to ripen here, the pollen would fall on the 
stigmas of the same plant, but that, by making 
the stigmas be the first to mature, the cuckoo-pint 
secures for itself the desired end of cross-fertili- 
sation. 

In this case it is an interesting fact that all 
the stages which led to the existing arrangement 
of the flowers still remain visible in other plants 
for us. These very reduced little blossoms of the 
cuckoo-pint, consisting each of a single carpel or 
a single stamen, are yet the descendants of per- 
fect blossoms which had once a regular calyx and 
corolla. Near relations of the cuckoo-pint live in 
Europe and Africa to this day, which recapitulate 
for us, as it were, the various stages in its slow evo- 
lution. Some, the oldest in type, have a calyx 
and corolla, green and inconspicuous, with six 
stamens inside them, enclosing a two or three- 
celled ovary. These are still essentially lilies in 
structure. But they have the flowers clustered, 
as in cuckoo-pint, on a thick club-stem, and they 
have an open spathe, which more or less protects 
them. Our English sweet-sedge is still at this 
stage of evolution. The marsh-calla of Northern 
Europe and Canada, on the other hand, has a 
handsome white spathe to attract insects, while 
its separate flowers, still both male and female to- 
gether, have each six stamens and a single ovary. 
But they have lost their perianth. The common 
white arum or " calla lily " of cottage gardens has 



124 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

a bright yellow spike in its midst, and if you look 
at it closely you will see that this spike consists 
entirely of a great cluster of stamens, thickly 
massed together. The top of the spike is en- 
tirely composed of such golden stamens, but lower 
down you will find ovaries embedded here and 
there among them, each ovary as a rule sur- 
rounded by five or six stamens. Lastly, in the 
cuckoo-pint the lower flowers have lost their com- 
plement of stamens altogether, while the upper 
ones have similarly lost their ovaries ; moreover, 
a few of the topmost have been converted into 
the curious lobster-pot hairs which assist, as I 
have shown you, in the work of fertilisation. 
We have here a singular and instructive exam- 
ple of what may be described as retrograde develop- 
ment. 

And now we must go on to those modes of 
fertilisation which are effected by agencies other 
than insects. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE WIND AS CARRIER. 

All flowers do not depend for fertilisation 
upon insects. In many plants it is the wind that 
serves the purpose of common carrier of pollen 
from blossom to blossom. 

Clearly, flowers which lay themselves out to 
be fertilised by the wind will not be likely to pro- 
duce the same devices as those which lay them- 
selves out to be fertilised by insects. Natural 
selection here will favour different qualities. 
Bright-coloured petals and stores of honey will 



THE WIND AS CARRIER. 125 

not serve to allure the unconscious breeze; such 
delicate adjustments of part to part as we saw in 
the case of bee and blossom will no longer be 
serviceable. What will most be needed now is 
quantities of pollen ; and that pollen must hang 
out in such a way from the cup as to be easily 
dislodged by passing breezes. Hence wind-fertil- 
ised flowers differ from insect-fertilised in the 
following particulars. They have never brilliant 
corollas or calyxes. The stamens are usually 
very numerous; they hang out freely on long 
stalks or filaments ; and they quiver in the wind 
with the slightest movement. On the other hand, 
the stigmas are feathery and protrude far from 
the flower, so as to catch every passing grain of 
pollen. More frequently than among the insect- 
fertilised section, the sexes are separated on dif- 
ferent plants or isolated in distinct masses on 
neighbouring branches. But numerous devices 
occur to prevent self-fertilisation. 

You must not suppose, again, that the wind- 
fertilised plants form a group by themselves, dis- 
tinct in origin from the insect-fertilised, as the 
three-petalled group is distinct from the five- 
petalled. On the contrary, wind-fertilised kinds 
are found abundantly in both great groups; it is 
a matter of habit; so much so that sometimes a 
type has taken first to insect-fertilisation and then 
to wind-fertilisation, with comparatively slight 
differences in its external appearance. Closely 
related plants often differ immensely in their mar- 
riage customs ; each has varied in the way that 
best suited itself, according as insects or breezes 
happened to serve it most readily. In my own 
opinion all wind-fertilised plants are the descend- 
ants of insect-fertilised ancestors; but I do not 



126 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

know whether in this belief my ideas would be 
accepted by most modern botanists. 

As a first example of wind-fertilised flowers, I 
will take the common dog's mercury, a well- 
known English wayside flower, frequent in copses 
and hedgerows, and one of the very earliest to 
blossom in spring. In this species the males and 
females grow on separate plants. They have 
each a calyx of three sepals (two more being sup- 
pressed, for they belong by origin to the fivefold 
division). The males have ten or twelve stamens 
apiece, which hang out freely with long stalks to 
the breeze. The females have a two-chambered 
ovary, with rudiments or relics of some two or 
three stamens by its side, showing that they are 
descended from earlier combined male-and-female 
ancestors. The relics, however, consist of mere 
empty stalks or filaments, without any pollen- 
sacks. Of course there are no petals. Male and 
female plants grow in little groups not far from 
one another ; and the pollen, which is dry and 
dusty, is carried by the wind from the hanging 
stamens of the males to the large and salient 
stigma of the female flowers. 

A still better example of a wind-fertilised 
blossom is afforded us by the common English 
salad-burnet, a pretty little weed, very frequent 
on close-cropped chalk downs (Fig. 27). Here 
the individual flowers are extremely small, and 
they are crowded into a sort of mop-like head at 
the top of the stem. They have lost their petals, 
which are now of no use to them ; but they retain 
a calyx of four sepals, to represent the original 
five still found among their relations. For salad- 
burnet, in spite of its inconspicuousness, belongs to 
the family of the roses, and we can still trace in 



THE WIND AS CARRIER. 



127 



this order a regular gradation from handsome 
flowers like the dog-rose, through smaller and 
smaller blossoms like the strawberry and the 
potentilla, to green petalless types like lady's- 
mantle and parsley-piert, or, last of all, to wind- 
fertilised blossoms like those of the salad-burnet. 
In the male flowers the very numerous stamens 
hang out on long thread-like stalks from the wee 
green cup, so that 
the wind may readily 
catch and carry the 
pollen ; in the female 
blossoms the stigma 
is divided into plume- 
like brushes, which 
readily entrap any 
passing pollen-grain. 
Moreover, though 
both kinds of flower 
grow on the same 
head, the females are 
mostly at the top of 
the bunch and the 
males below them. 

This makes it difficult for the pollen from the same 
head to fertilise the females, as it would easily do 
if the males were at the top. Nor is that all ; the 
female flowers open first on each head, and hang 
out their pretty feathery stigmas to the breeze 
that bends the stem ; as soon as they have been 
fertilised from a neighbour plant, the males in 
turn begin to open, and shed their pollen for the 
use of other flowers. In salad-burnet, however, 
the division of the sexes into separate flowers has 
not become a quite fixed habit; for, though most 
of the blossoms are either male or female only, 




Fig. 27.— A, male, and B, female 
flower of salad-burnet, very much 
magnified. The flowers grow to- 
gether in little tassel-like heads. 



128 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

as shown in the figure, we often find a cup here 
and there which contains both stamens and pistil 
together. 

I have already told you that in many plants 
the calyx helps the corolla as an advertisement 
for insects; and sometimes, as in the marsh- 
marigold and the various anemones, where there 
are no petals at all, it becomes so brilliant as to 
be mistaken for petals by all but botanists. One 
way in which such a substitution often happens 
is shown us by the great burnet, which is a close 
relation of the salad-burnet. This plant, after 
having acquired the habit of wind-fertilisation, 
has taken again at last to insect marriage. Hav- 
ing lost its petals, however, it can't easily rede- 
velop them; so it has had instead to make its 
calyx purple. The plant as a whole closely re- 
sembles the salad-burnet; but the flowers are 
rather different ; the stamens no longer hang out 
of the calyx; the calyx cup is more tubular; and 
the stigma is shortened to a little sticky knob, 
instead of being divided into feathery fringes. 
These differences are all very characteristic of 
the contrast between wind and insect-fertilisation. 

The common nettle supplies us with an excel- 
lent example of another form of wind-fertilisa- 
tion, carried to a still higher pitch of develop- 
ment. Here the sexes grow on different plants, 
and the flowers are tiny, green, and inconspicu- 
ous. The males consist of a calyx of four sepals, 
each sepal with a stamen curiously caught under 
it during the immature stage. But as soon as they 
ripen they burst out elastically, and shoot their 
pollen into the air around them. In this case, 
and in many like it, the plant itself helps the 
wind, as it were, to disseminate its pollen. 



THE WIND AS CARRIER. 



I29 



The common English bur- 
reed is a waterside plant of 
great beauty which shows us 
another interesting instance 
of wind-fertilisation in an ad- 
vanced condition (Fig. 28). 
Here the separate flowers are 
very much reduced — as sim- 
ple, in fact, as those of the 
cuckoo-pint. The males con- 
sist of nothing but stamens, 
gathered in close -globular 
heads, with a few small scales 
interspersed among them, 
which seem to represent the 
last relics of a calyx. The 
females are made up of single 
ovaries, each surrounded by 
three or six scales, still form- 
ing a simple rudimentary ca- 
lyx. They, too, are clustered 
in round heads or masses on 
antler -like branches. The 
plant belongs to the threefold 
group, and represents a very 
degenerate descendant of a 
primitive ancestor something 
like the arrow T head already 
described in the last chapter. 
But the arrangement of the 
heads on the stem is very in- 
teresting. The balls at the 
top are entirely composed of 
male flowers; those at the 
bottom are exclusively female 
ers ripen first, and receive pollen by aid of the 
9 




Fig. 28. — Flowers of bur- 
reed. The two lower 
heads consist of female 
blossoms, the five upper 
ones of males. Only 
one head of the males 
is mature ; the others 
are still in the bud. 

The female flow- 



130 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

wind from some other plant that grows close by 
them. As soon as they have begun to set their 
seeds the stigmas wither, and then the male flow- 
ers open in a bright yellow mass, the stalks of 
their stamens lengthening out as they do so, and 
allowing the wind to carry the pollen freely. 
Here, although the males are above, the peculiar 
arrangement by which the females ripen first 
makes it practically impossible for the flowers to 
be fertilised by pollen from their immediate neigh- 
bours. 

The devices for wind-fertilisation, however, 
are on the whole less interesting than those for 
insect-fertilisation, so I shall devote little more 
space to describing them. I will only add that 
two great classes of plants are habitually wind- 
fertilised : one includes the majority of forest 
trees; the other includes the grasses, sedges, and 
many other common meadow plants. 

The wind-fertilised forest trees belong for the 
most part to the fivefold group, and have their 
flowers, as a rule, clustered together into bang- 
ing and pendulous bunches, which we call catkbis. 
It is obvious why trees should have adopted this 
mode of fertilisation, because they grow high, and 
it is easy for the wind to move freely through them. 
For this reason, most catkin-bearing trees flower 
in early spring, when winds are high, and when 
the trees are leafless; because then the foliage 
doesn't interfere with the proper carriage of the 
pollen. In summer the leaves would get in the 
way ; the pollen would fall on them ; and the 
stigmas would be hidden. Most catkins are long, 
and easily moved by the wind ; they have numer- 
ous flowers in each, and they shake out enormous 
quantities of pollen. This you can see for your- 



THE WIND AS CARRIER. 131 

self by shaking a hazel branch in the flowering 
season, when you will find yourself covered by a 
perfect shower of pollen. 

In hazel (Fig. 29) the male and female flowers 
grow on the same tree, but are most different to 
look at. You would hardly take them for cor- 
responding parts of the same species. The male 
flowers are grouped in long sausage-shaped cat- 
kins, each blossom covered with a tiny brown 
scale, and all arranged like tiles on a roof against 
the cold of winter. There are about eight sta- 
mens to each blossom, with little trace of a calyx 




Fig. 29 — Flowers of the hazel. I, a single male flower, removed 
from a catkin ; II, a pair of female flowers ; III, a female 
catkin. 

or corolla. But the females are grouped in funny 
little buds, like crimson tufts, well protected by 
scales; they consist of the future hazel-nut, with 
a red style and feathery stigma projecting above 
to catch the pollen. Here the flowers are very 
little like the regular types with which we are 
familiar; yet intermediate cases help to bridge 
over the gap for us. 

For example, in the alder we get a type which 
seems to stand half-way between the nettle and 
the hazel (so far, I mean, as the arrangement of 
the flower is concerned, for otherwise the nettle 



132 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

belongs to a quite different family). The male 
and female catkins of the alder grow on the same 
tree; the males consist of numerous clustered 
flowers, three together under a scale, which never- 
theless, when we take the trouble to pick them 
out and examine them with a pocket-lens, are 
seen to resemble very closely the male flowers of 
the nettle. Each consists of a four-lobed calyx, 
with four stamens opposite the sepals. The fe- 
male flowers have degenerated still further, and 
consist of little more than a scale and an ovary. 

Other well-known wind-fertilised, catkin-bear- 
ing trees are the oak, the beech, the birch, and the 
hornbeam. But the willows, though they bear 
catkins, and were once no doubt wind-fertilised, 
have now returned once more to insect-fertilisa- 
tion, as you can easily convince yourself if you 
stand under a willow tree in early spring, when 
you will hear all the branches alive with the buzz- 
ing of bees, both wild and domestic. Neverthe- 
less, the willow, having once lost its petals, has 
been unable to develop them again. Still, its 
catkins are far handsomer and more conspicuous 
than those of its wind-fertilised cousins, owing to 
the pretty white scales of the female bunches, and 
the numerous bright yellow stamens of the males. 
It is this that causes them to be used for " palm " 
in churches on Palm Sunday. The male and fe- 
male catkins grow on different trees, so as to en- 
sure cross-fertilisation, and the difference between 
the two forms is greater perhaps than in almost 
any other plant, the males consisting of two 
showy stamens behind a winged scale, and the 
females of a peculiar woolly-looking ovary. 

Even more important is the great wind-fertil- 
ised group of the grasses, to which belong by far 



THE WIND AS CARRIER. 133 

the most useful food-plants of man, such as wheat, 
rice, barley, Indian corn, and millet. 

Grasses are for the most part plants of the 
open wind-swept plains, and they seem naturally 
to take therefore to wind-fertilisation. Their 
flowers are generally small, clustered into light 
spikes or waving panicles, and hung out freely to 
the breeze on slender and very movable stems, 
so as to yield their pollen to every breath of air 
that passes. Moreover, the plants as a whole are 
slender and waving, so that they bend before the 
breeze in the mass, as one often sees in a meadow 
or cornfield. Thus the grasses are almost the 
pure type of wind-fertilised plants; certainly 
they have carried further than any other race 
the devices which render wind-fertilisation more 
certain. 

On this account they are so complicated and 
varied that I will not attempt to describe them in 
detail. I will only say that grasses are descend- 
ants of the threefold flowers, and in all proba- 
bility degenerate lilies. Their individual blos- 
soms usually consist of a very degraded calyx 
(^and e) of two sepals (one of which represents a 
pair that have coalesced, Fig. 30). Inside these 
sepals come two very minute white petals (c and 
c) ; the third has disappeared, owing to pressure 
one-sidedly. The petals can scarcely be seen 
without the aid of a pocket-lens. Next comes 
three stamens (b), the only part of the flower 
which still preserves the original threefold ar- 
rangement. Last of all we get the ovary (a), of 
one carpel, one seeded, but with two feathery 
stigmas, which were once three. In a very few 
large grasses, such as the bamboos, the threefold 
arrangement is much more conspicuous. As a 



134 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



rule the stamens of grasses hang out freely to 
the wind, and the stigmas are feathery and most 
graceful in outline (Fig. 31). The flowers are 
usually collected in spikes like that of wheat, or 
in loose clusters like oats; they frequently hang 
over in pendulous bunches. Their success may 





Fig. 30. — A flower of wheat, Fig. 31.— Flower of wheat, with 

with its parts divided, #, the calyx of two chaffy scales 

the carpel and stigmas ; £, removed This shows the 

the stamens ; c, the petals, arrangement of petals, sta- 

very minute ; d and e, the mens, and ovary, 
calyx. 

be gathered from the fact that almost all the 
great plains in the world, such as the American 
prairies, the Pampas, and the Steppes, are covered 
with grasses; while even in hilly countries the 
valleys and downs are also largely clad with 
smaller and more delicate species. No plants 
assume so great a variety of divergent forms; 
the total number of kinds of grasses can hardly 
be estimated ; in Britain alone we have more 
than a hundred native species. 



HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 135 

I will give no further examples of wind- 
fertilised flowers. If you look for yourself you 
can find dozens on all sides in the fields around 
you. They may almost always be recognised by 
these two marked features of the hanging stamens 
and the feathery stigma. 

Before I pass on to another subject, however, 
I ought to mention that by no means all flowers 
are regularly cross-fertilised. There are some 
degraded types in which self-fertilisation has be- 
come habitual. In these plants, which are usually 
poor and feeble weeds like groundsel and shep- 
herd's purse, the stamens bend round so as to 
impregnate the pistil in the same blossom. In 
other less degraded cases the flower is occasion- 
ally cross-fertilised by insect visits; but if no 
insect turns up in time, the stamens, even in 
handsome and attractive blossoms, often bend 
round and impregnate the pistil. A very good 
example of this is seen in our smaller English 
mallow, which has large mauve flowers to attract 
insects; but should none come to visit it, the 
stamens and stigmas at last intertwine, and self- 
fertilisation takes place, for want of better. Still, 
as a general rule, it holds good that self-fertilisa- 
tion belongs to scrubby and degraded plants; it 
is only adopted as a last resort when all other 
means fail by the superior species. 



CHAPTER X. 

HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 

In the preceding chapters I have dealt for the 
most part with individual flowers ; I have spoken 



136 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

of them separately, and of the work they do in 
getting the seeds set. Incidentally, however, it 
has been necessary at times to touch slightly upon 
the way they often mass themselves into heads 
or clusters for various purposes; and we must 
now begin to consider more seriously the origin 
and nature of these co-operative societies. 

Very large flowers, like the water-lily, the 
tulip, the magnolia, the daffodil, are usually soli- 
tary ; they suffice by themselves to attract in 
sufficient numbers the fertilising insects. But 
smaller flowers often find it pays them better to 
group themselves into big spikes or masses, as 
one sees, for example, in the foxglove and the 
lilac. Such an arrangement makes the mass more 
conspicuous, and it also induces the insect, when 
he comes, to fertilise at a single visit a large num- 
ber of distinct blossoms. It is a mutual conven- 
ience ; for the bee or butterfly, it saves valuable 
time; for the plant, it ensures more prompt and 
certain fertilisation. In many families, therefore, 
we can trace a regular gradation between large 
and almost solitary flowers, through smaller and 
somewhat clustered flowers, to very small and 
comparatively crowded flowers. Thus the largest 
lilies are usually solitary or grow at best three or 
four together, like the lilium auratum ; in the 
tuberose and asphodel, where the individual blos- 
soms are smaller, they are gathered together in 
big upright spikes; in the hyacinth, the clustering 
is closer still; while in wild garlic, grape-hya- 
cinth, and star-of-Bethlehem, the arrangement 
assumes the form of a flat-topped bunch or a 
globular cluster. Of course, small flowers are 
sometimes solitary, and large ones sometimes 
clustered; but as a general rule the tendency is 



HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 137 

for the big blossoms to trust to their own indi- 
vidual attractions, and for the little ones to feel 
that union is strength, and to organise accord- 
ingly. 

Botanists have invented many technical names 
for various groupings of flowers in particular 
fashions, with most of which I will not trouble 
you. It will be sufficient to recall mentally the 
very different way in which the flowers are ar- 
ranged in the lily-of-the-valley, the foxglove, the 
Solomon's seal, the heath, the scabious, the cow- 
slip, the sweet-william, the forget-me-not, in order 
to see what variety natural selection has produced 
in all these matters. Two instances must serve 
to illustrate their mode of action. The foxglove 
grows in hedgerows and thickets, and turns its 
one-sided spike towards the sun and the open ; its 
flowers open regularly from below upward, and are 
fertilised by bees, who enter the blossoms, and 
whose body is beautifully adapted to come in 
contact, first with the stamens, and later with the 
stigma. (Examine this familiar flower for your- 
self in the proper season.) In the forget-me-not, 
on the other hand, the unopened flowers are 
coiled up like a scorpion's tail ; but as each one 
opens, the stem below it lengthens and unrolls, so 
that at each moment the two or three flowers just 
ready for fertilisation are displayed conspicuously 
at the top of the apparent cluster. 

There are two forms of cluster, however, so 
specially important that I cannot pass them over 
here without some words of explanation. These 
are the umbel and the head, both of frequent oc- 
currence. An umbel is a cluster in which the 
flowers, standing on separate stalks, reach at last 
the same level, so as to form a flat-topped mass, 



138 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

like the surface of a table. An immense family 
of plants has very small flowers arranged in such 
an order ; they are known as umbellates, and 




Fig. 32. — Clusters of flowers. I, spike of mercury, green, wind- 
fertilised ; II, panicle of a grass (brome), green, wind-fertilised ; 
III, head of Dutch clover, the upper flowers unvisited as yet 
by insects ; the lower fertilised, and turning down to make 
room for their neighbours. 

they include hemlock, fool's parsley, cow-parsnip, 
carrot, chervil, celery, angelica, and samphire. 
In other families the same form of cluster is seen 



HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 1 39 

in ivy and garlic. A head, again, is a cluster in 
which the individual flowers are set close on very 
short stalks or none at all in a round ball or a 
circle. Clover and scabious are excellent ex- 
amples of this sort of co-operation. 

If you examine a head of common white Dutch 
clover (Fig. 32, iii.), you will see for yourself that 
it is not, as you might suppose, a single flower, 
but a thick mass of small white pea-like blos- 
soms, each on a stalk of its own, and each pro- 
vided with calyx, corolla, stamens, and pistil. 
They are fertilised by bees ; and as soon as the 
bee has impregnated each blossom, it turns down 
and closes over, so as to warn the future visitor 
that he has nothing to expect there. The flowers 
open from below and without, upward and in- 
ward ; and there is always a broad line between 
the rifled and fertilised flowers, which hang down 
as if retired from business, and the fresh and up- 
standing virgin blossoms, which court the bees 
with their bright corollas. Sometimes you will 
find a head of clover in which all the flowers save 
one have already been fertilised ; and this one, a 
solitary old maid as it were, stands up in the cen- 
tre still waiting for the bees to come and ferti- 
lise it. 

By far the most interesting form of head, how- 
ever, is that which occurs in the daisy, the sun- 
flower, the dandelion, and their allies, where the 
club or co-operative society of united blossoms so 
closely simulates a single flower as to be univer- 
sally mistaken for one by all but botanical ob- 
servers. To the world at large a daisy or a dahlia 
is simply a flower ; in reality it is nothing of the 
sort, but a city or community of distinct flowers, 
differing widely from one another in structure 



140 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



and function, but all banded together in due sub- 
ordination for the purpose of effecting a common 
object. There is avast and very varied family of 
such united flowers, known as the composites; it 
stands at the head of the fivefold group of flower- 
ing plants, as the orchids stand at the head of the 
threefold ; and it is so widely spread, it includes 
so large a proportion of the best-known plants, 
and it fills so great a space in the vegetable world 
generally, that I cannot possibly pass it over even 





Fig. 33. — Single floret from the 
centre of a daisy. 



Fig. 34. — Single floret from the 
centre of a daisy, with the co- 
rolla opened, much enlarged 



in so brief and hasty a history as this of the de- 
velopment of plants on the surface of our planet. 
If you pick a daisy you will think at first 
sight it is a single flower. But if you look closer 
into it you will see it is really a great group of 
flowers — a compound flower-head, composed of 
many dozen distinct blossoms or florets, as we 
call them (Fig. 33). These, however, are not all 
alike. The florets in the centre, which you took 
no doubt at first sight for the stamens and pistils, 
are small yellow tubular blossoms, each with a 



HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 



141 



combined corolla of five lobes, little or no visible 
calyx, five stamens united in a ring round the 
style, and a pistil consisting of an inferior ovary, 
with a style divided above into a twofold stigma 
(Fig. 34). Here we have clear evidence that the 
plant belongs by origin to the five-petalled group ; 
it rather resembles the harebell, in the plan of its 
flower, on a much smaller scale; but it has almost 
lost all trace of a separate calyx, it has its five 
petals united into a tubular corolla, it has still its 
original five stamens, but its carpels are now re- 
duced to one, with a single 
seed, though traces of an 
earlier intermediate stage, 
when the carpels were two, 
remains even yet in the di- 
vided stigma. 

So much for the inner 
flowers or florets in the daisy. 
The outer ones, which you 
took at first no doubt for 
petals, are very different in- 
deed from these central blos- 
soms. They have an ex- 
tremely curious long, strap- 
shaped corolla (Fig.35),open 
down the side, but tubular 
at its base, as if it had been 
split through the greater part 
of its length by a sharp pen- 
knife. Instead of being yel- 
low, too, these outer florets are white, slightly 
tinged with pink, and they form the largest and 
most attractive part of the whole flower-head. 
Furthermore, they are female only ; they have a 
style and ovary, but no stamens. Clearly, we have 




Fig. 35. — Single floret from 
the ray of a daisy, pink 
and white, with an 
ovary, but no stamens. 



142 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

here a flower-head with numerous unlike flowers, 
which at once suggests the idea of a division of 
labour between the component members. How 
this division works we shall see in the sequel. 

The best way to see it is to follow up in detail 
the evolution of the daisy and the other com- 
posites from an earlier ancestor. We saw already 
how the petals combined in the harebell and many 
other flowers so as to form a tubular corolla. A 
purple flower of some such type seems to have 
been the starting-point for the development of 
the great composite family. The individual blos- 
soms in the common ancestral form seem to have 
been small and numerous ; and, as often happens 
with small flowers, they found that by grouping 
themselves together in a flat head they succeeded 
much better in attracting the attention of the fer- 
tilising insects. Many other tubular flowers that 
are not composites have independently hit upon 
the same device; such are the scabious, the 
devil's-bit, the sheep's-bit, and the rampion. But 
these flowers differ from the true composites in 
two or three particulars. In the first place, each 
tiny flower has a distinct green calyx, of five se- 
pals ; while the composites have none, or at least 
a degraded one. In the second place, the stamens 
are free, while in the composites they have united 
in a ring or cylinder. In the third place, the 
ovary is divided into from two to five cells, a rem- 
iniscence of the original five distinct carpels; 
whereas in the composites the ovary is always 
single and one-seeded. In all these respects, 
therefore, the composites are later and more ad- 
vanced types than, say, the sheep's-bit, which is a 
flower-head composed of very tiny harebells. 

The composites, then, started with florets which 



HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 143 

had little or no calyx, the sepals having been con- 
verted into tiny feathery hairs, used to float the 
fruit (as in thistledown and dandelion), about 
which we shall have more to say in a future chap- 
ter. They had a corolla of five purple petals, com- 
bined into a single tube. Inside this again came 
five united stamens, and in the midst of all an in- 
ferior ovary with a divided stigma. Hundreds of 
different kinds of composites now existing on the 
earth retain to this day, in the midst of the great- 
est external diversity, these essential features, or 
the greater part of them. 

You may take thistle as a good example of the 
composite flowers in an early and relatively simple 
stage of development (Fig. 36). Here the whole 
flower-head resembles a single large purple blos- 
som. To increase the resemblance, it has below 
it what seems at first sight to be a big green calyx 
of very numerous sepals. What is this deceptive 
object ? Well, it is called an involucre, and it really 
acts to the compound flower-head very much as 
the calyx acts to the single blossom. The florets 
having got rid of their separate calyxes, the flower- 
head provides itself with a cup of leaves (tech- 
nically called bracts), which protect the unopened 
head in its early stages, and serve to keep off ants 
or other creeping insects exactly as a calyx does 
for the single flower. Inside this involucre, again, 
all the florets of the thistle are equal and similar. 
Each has a tiny calyx, hardly recognisable as 
such, made up of feathery hairs which cap the 
inferior ovary. Within this fallacious calyx, once 
more, the floret has a purple corolla of five petals, 
united into a tube. Then come the five united 
stamens, and the pistil with its divided stigma. 
This is the simplest and central form of compos- 



144 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

ite, from which the others are descended with 

various modifications. 

To this central type belong a large number of 

well-known plants, both useful and ornamental, 

though more particularly deleterious. Among 

them may be mentioned 
the various thistles, 
such as the common 
thistle, the milk thistle, 
the Scotch thistle, and 
so forth, most of which 
have their involucres, 
and often their leaves 
as well, extremely 
prickly, so as to ward 
off the attacks of goats 
and cattle. The bur- 
dock, the artichoke, the 
saw - wort, and the 
globe-thistle also be- 
long to the same cen- 
tral division. Among 
these earlier compos- 
ites, however, there is 
one group, that of the 
centauries, which leads 
us gradually on to the 
next division. Our com- 

Fig. 36-Flower-head of a thistle, monest centaury in 

consisting of very numerous _, . . ,, J . 

purple florets, all equal and Britain (known to boys 

similar. a s hardheads) has all 

the florets equal and 
similar, and looks in the flower very much like a 
thistle. But one of its forms, and most of the 
cultivated garden centauries, have the outer florets 
much larger and more broadly open than the cen- 




HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 145 

tral ones, so that they form an external petal-like 
row, which adds greatly to the attractiveness of 
the entire flower-head. Of this type, the common 
blue cornflower is a familiar example. Clearly the 
plant has here developed the outer florets more 
than the inner ones in order to make them act as 
extra special attractions to the insect fertilisers. 

The more familiar type of composites so much 
cultivated in gardens carries these tactics a step 
further. We saw reason to believe in a previous 
chapter that petals were originally stamens, flat- 
tened and brightly coloured, and told off for the 
special attractive function. Just in the same way 
the ray-florets of the daisy, the sunflower, the 
single dahlia, and the aster are florets which have 
been flattened and partially or wholly sterilised 
in order to act as allurements to insects. The 
ray-floret acts for the compound flower-head as 
the petal acts for the individual blossom. 

In many other families of plants besides the 
composites we get foreshadowings, so to speak, of 
this mode of procedure. The outer flowers of a 
cluster, be it head or umbel, are often rendered 
larger so as to increase the effective attractive- 
ness of the whole; and sometimes they are sacri- 
ficed to the inner ones by being made neuter or 
sterile, that is to say, being deprived of stamens 
and pistil. Thus in cow-parsnip, which is a mem- 
ber of the same family as the carrot and the hem- 
lock, the outer flowers of each umbel are much 
larger than the central ones, while in the. wild 
guelder-rose the central flowers alone are fertile, 
the outer ones being converted into mere ex- 
panded white corollas with no essential floral 
organs. But it is the composites that have car- 
ried this process of division of labour furthest, 
10 



146 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

by making the ray-florets into mere petal-like 
straps, which do no work themselves, but simply 
serve to attract the fertilising insects to the com- 
pound flower-head. 

An immense number of these composites with 
flattened ray-florets grow in our fields or are cul- 
tivated in our gardens. In the simpler among 
them, such as the sunflower, the corn-marigold, 
the ragwort, and the golden-rod, both ray-florets 
and central florets are simply yellow. But in 
others, such as the daisy, the ox-eye daisy, the 
aster, and the camomile, the ray-florets differ in 
colour from those of the centre ; the latter re- 
main yellow, while the former become white, or 
are tinged with pink, or even flaunt forth in scar- 
let, crimson, blue, or purple. Of this class one 
may mention as familiar instances the dahlia, the 
zinnia, the Michaelmas daisies, the cinerarias, and 
the pretty coreopsis so common in our gardens. 
Gardeners, however, are not content to let us ad- 
mire these flowers as nature made them. They 
generally " double " them — that is to say, by care- 
fully selecting certain natural varieties, they pro- 
duce a form in which all the florets have at last 
become neutral and strap-shaped. This is well 
seen in the garden chrysanthemum, where, how- 
ever, if you open the very centre of the doubled 
flower-head, you will generally find in its midst 
a few remaining fertile tubular blossoms. The 
same process is also well seen in the various 
stages between the single and the double dahlia. 
Such "double" composites can set little or no 
seed, and are therefore from the point of view of 
the plant mere abortions. Nor are they beauti- 
ful to an eye accustomed to the ground plan of 
floral architecture. Remember, of course, that 



HOW FLOWERS CLUB TOGETHER. 147 

what we call " a double flower " in a rose, a but- 
tercup, or any other simple blossom is one in 
which the stamens have been converted into super- 
numerary and useless petals; while in a composite 
it is a flower-head in which the central florets 
have been converted into barren ray-florets. In 
either case, however, the result is the same — the 
flowers are rendered abortive and sterile. 

Nature's way is quite different. Here is how 
she manages the fertilisation of one of these ray- 
bearing composites — say for example the sun- 
flower, where the individual florets are quite big 
enough to enable one to follow the process with 
the naked eye. The large yellow rays act as ad- 
vertisements ; the bee, attracted by them, settles 
on the outer edge and fertilises the flowers from 
without inward. To meet this habit of his, the 
florets of the sunflower pass through four regu- 
lar stages. They open from without inward. In 
the centre are unopened buds. Next come open 
flowers, in which the stamens are shedding their 
pollen, while the stigmas are still hidden within 
the tube. Third in order, we get florets in which 
the stamens have withered, while the stigmas have 
now ripened and opened. Last of all, we get, 
next to the rays, a set of overblown florets, en- 
gaged in maturing their fertilised fruits. The 
bee thus comes first to the florets in the female 
stage, which he fertilises with pollen from the 
last plant he visited ; he then goes on to florets 
in the male stage, where he collects more pollen 
for the next plant to which he chooses to devote 
his attention. The florets of the sunflower are 
interesting also for the fact that, unlike most 
composites, they still retain obvious traces of a 
true calyx. 



148 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

The composites which produce purple or blue 
ray-florets to attract insects are in some ways the 
highest of their class. Still, there is another group 
of composites which has proceeded a little further 
in one direction ; and that is the group which in- 
cludes the dandelions. In these heads all the 
florets alike have become strap-shaped or ray- 
like ; but they differ from the double composites 
of the gardeners in this, that each floret still re- 
tains its stamens and pistil. The composites of 
the dandelion group are chiefly weeds like the 
hawkbit and the sow-thistle. A few are cultivated 
as vegetables, such as lettuce, salsify, chicory, 
and endive ; fewer still are prized for their flow- 
ers for ornamental purposes, such as the orange 
hawkweed. The prevailing colour in this class is 
yellow, and the devices for insect-fertilisation are 
not nearly so high as in the ray-bearing group. 
I regard them as to a great extent a retrograde 
tribe of the composite family. 

In this chapter I have dealt chiefly with the 
co-operative clubbing together of insect-fertilised 
flowers, for purposes of mutual convenience; but 
you must not forget that similar clubs exist also 
among the wind-fertilised blossoms in quite equal 
profusion. Such are the catkins of forest trees, 
the panicles of grasses, the spikes of sedges, and 
the heads of the black-cap rush and many other 
water-plants. Some of these, such as the bur- 
reed, we have already considered. 

Lastly, I ought to add that where the flowers 
themselves are inconspicuous, attention is often 
called to them by a bright-coloured leaf or group 
of leaves in their immediate neighbourhood. We 
saw an instance of this in the great white spathe 
or folding leaf which encloses the male and female 



WHAT PLANTS DO FOR THEIR YOUNG. 149 

flowers of the " calla lily." In the greenhouse 
poinsettia the individual flowers are tiny and un- 
noticeable; but they are rich in honey, and round 
them has been developed a great bunch of bril- 
liant scarlet leaves which renders them among 
the most decorative objects in nature. A laven- 
der that grows in Southern Europe has dusky 
brown flowers; but the bunch is crowned by a 
number of mauve or lilac leaves, hung out like 
flags to attract the insects. A scarlet salvia much 
grown in windows similarly supplements its rather 
handsome flowers by much handsomer calyxes 
and bracts which make it a perfect blaze of splen- 
did colour. It doesn't matter to the plant how it 
produces its effect ; all it cares for is that by hook 
or by crook it should attract its insects and get 
itself fertilised. 



CHAPTER XI. 

WHAT PLANTS DO FOR THEIR YOUNG. 

After the flower is fertilised it has to set its 
seed. And after the seed is set the plant has to 
sow and disperse it. 

Now, the fruit and seed form the most difficult 
part of technical botany, and I will not apologise 
for treating them here a little cavalierly. I will 
tell you no more about them than it is actually 
necessary you should know, leaving you to pur- 
sue the subject if you will in more formal treatises. 

The pistil, after it has been fertilised and ar- 
rived at maturity, is called the fruit. In flowers 
like the buttercup, where there are many carpels, 
the fruit consists of distinct parts, each one-seeded 



150 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

little nuts in the meadow buttercup, but many- 
seeded pods in the marsh-marigold and the lark- 
spur. Where the carpels have combined into a 
single ovary, we get a many-chambered fruit, as 
in the poppy, which consists, when cut across, of 
ten seed-bearing chambers. Most fruits are dry 
capsules or pods, either single, as in the pea, the 
bean, the vetch, and the laburnum ; or double, as 
in the wallflower and shepherd's-purse ; or many- 
chambered, as in the lily, the wild hyacinth, the 
poppy, the campion. As a rule the fruit consists 
of as many carpels or as many chambers as the 
unfertilised ovary. 

Fruits are often dispersed entire, and this is 
especially true when they contain only one or 
two seeds. In such instances they sometimes fall 
on the ground direct, as is the case with most 
nuts ; or else they have wings or parachutes which 
enable the wind to seize them, and carry them 
to a distance, where they can alight on unex- 
hausted soil, far away from the roots of the 
mother plant. Such fruits are common among 
forest trees. The maples, for example, have a 
double fruit, often called a key, which the wind 
whirls away as soon as the seeds are ready for 
dispersion (Figs. 37, $&, 39, 40, 41). In the lime, 
the common stalk of the flowers is winged by a 
thin leaf; and when the little nuts are ripe the 
wind detaches them and carries them away by 
means of this joint parachute. In the birch, elm, 
and ash the fruit is a one-seeded nut, with its edge 
produced into a leathery or papery wing, which 
serves to float it. 

But more often the fruit at maturity opens 
and scatters its seeds, as we see in the pea, the 
wild hyacinth, and the iris. Sometimes the seeds 



WHAT PLANTS DO FOR THEIR YOUNG. 151 



so released merely drop upon the ground, but 
most often some device exists for scattering them 
to a distance, so as to obtain the advantage of 
unexhausted soil for the young seedling. Thus 




most capsules open at the top, so that the seeds, 
can only drop out when the wind is high enough 
to carry them to some distance. In the poppy- 



152 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

head the capsule opens by pores at the side, and, 
if you shake one as it grows, you will find it takes 
a considerable shaking to dislodge the seeds from 
the walls of their chamber. Thus only in high 
winds are the poppy seeds dispersed. In the 
mouse-ear chickweed the capsule is directed 
slightly upward at the end for a similar purpose. 
Sometimes, again, the valves of the fruit open 
elastically and shoot out the seeds; this device is 
familiarly known in the garden balsam, and it 
occurs also in the little English wallcress. The 
sandbox-tree of the West Indies has a large round 
woody capsule, which bursts with a report like a 
pistol, and scatters its seeds with such violence as 
to inflict a severe wound upon anybody who hap- 
pens to be struck by them. 

Where seeds are numerous, they are oftenest 
dispersed in some such manner, by the capsule 
opening naturally and scattering its contents; 
but where they are few in number, it more fre- 
quently happens that the fruit does not open, as 
in the oak or the elm; and when there is only one 
seed, the fruit and seed become almost indistin- 
guishable, and are popularly regarded as a seed 
only. For example, in the pea, we distinguish at 
once between the pod, which is a fruit containing 
many seeds, and the pea which is one such seed 
among the many ; but in wheat or oats the fruit 
is small and one-seeded, and its covering is so 
closely united with the seed as to be practically 
inseparable. Fruits like these do not open, and 
are dispersed whole. The fruits of most compos- 
ites are crowned by the feather-like hairs which 
represent the calyx, and float on the breeze as 
thistledown or dandelion clocks (Figs. 42, 43, 44, 
45). John-go-to-bed-at-noon, an English compos- 



WHAT PLANTS DO FOR THEIR YOUNG. 153 

ite of the dandelion type, has a very remarkable 
and highly-developed parachute of this descrip- 
tion. In the anemones and clematis the fruit 
consists of several distinct one-seeded carpels, 




each furnished with a long feathery awn for the 
purpose of floating ; our common English clematis 
or traveller's joy, when in the fruiting condition, 
is known on this account as "old man's beard." 
Floating fruits like these, or those of many sedges 



154 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

and grasses, will often be carried by the wind for 
miles together. A well-known example of this 
type is the sedge commonly though wrongly de- 
scribed as cotton-grass. 

In other instances it is the seed, not the fruit, 
that is winged or feathered. The pod of the wil- 
low opens at maturity, and allows a large number 
of cottony seeds to escape upon the breeze. The 
same thing happens in the beautiful rose-bay and 
the other willow-herbs. Cotton is composed of 
the similar floating hairs attached to the seeds of 
a sub-tropical mallow-like tree. 

You will have observed, however, that not one 
of the fruits which I have hitherto mentioned is a 
fruit at all in the common or popular acceptation 
of the word. They are only at best what most 
people call pods or capsules. A true fruit, as most 
people think of it, is coloured, juicy, pulpy, sweet, 
and edible. How did such fruits come into exist- 
ence, and what is the use of them? 

Well, just as certain plants desire to attract 
insects to fertilise their flowers, so do other plants 
desire to attract birds and beasts to disseminate 
their fruits for them. If any fruit happened to 
possess a coloured and juicy outer coat, or to show 
any tendency towards the production of such a 
coat, it would sooner or later be eaten by animals. 
If the animal digested the actual seed, however, 
so much the worse for the plant, and we shall see 
by and by that most plants take great care to 
prevent their true seeds being eaten and assimi- 
lated by animals. But if the seed was very small 
and tough, or had a stony covering, it would either 
be passed through the animal's body undigested, 
or else thrown away by him when he had finished 



WHAT PLANTS DO FOR THEIR YOUNG. 155 

eating the pulpy exterior. So, many plants have 
acquired fruits of this description — edible fruits, 
intended for the attraction of birds and animals. 
As a rule the animals disperse the seeds in the 
well-manured soil near their own nests or lairs, 
so that the young plants produced from such fruits 
start in life under exceptional advantages. 

Fruits that seek to attract animals use much 
the same baits to allure them in the way of colour 
and sweet taste as do the flowers that seek to at- 
tract insects. But just as almost any part of the 
flower may be brightly coloured, so almost any 
part of the fruit may be sweet and pulpy. Thus 
we get an astonishing and rather embarrassing 
variety of special devices in this matter. 

A few instances must suffice us. In the rasp- 
berry and blackberry the fruit consists of sepa- 
rate carpels, in each of which the outer coat be- 
comes soft and sweet, while the actual seed is 
hard and nut-like. In the one case the fruit is 
red, in the other black, but very conspicuous 
among the green leaves in autumn. These ber- 
ries are eaten by birds, and their seeds are dis- 
persed in copse or hedgerow. But in the straw- 
berry, which is a near relation of both, with a very 
similar flower, the actual carpels remain to the end 
quite small and seed-like ; they are the tiny hard 
objects scattered about in pits like miniature nuts 
over the surface of the ripe berry. Here it is the 
common receptacle of the fruit that swells out 
and reddens, the part answering to the central 
piece which comes out whole in the middle of the 
raspberry ; so that what we eat in the one fruit is 
the very same part as what we throw away in the 
other. In the plum, the cherry, and the peach, 
on the other hand, there is but one carpel, and its 



156 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

outer covering grows soft, sweet, and brightly col- 
oured; while the actual seed, though soft, is con- 
tained in a hard and stony jacket, an inner layer of 
the fruit coat. Here the true seed is what we call 
the kernel, but it is amply protected by its bone- 
like coverlet. In the apple and pear the ovary is 
inferior; the fruit is thus crowned by the remains 
of the calyx ; if you cut it across you will find it 
consists of a fleshy part, which is the swollen stem, 
enclosing the true fruit or core, with a number of 
seeds which we call the pips. All these fruits be- 
long to the family of the roses ; they serve to show 
the immense variety of plan and structure which 
occurs even in closely related species. Other suc- 
culent fruits of the same family are the rose-hip, 
the haw, the medlar, and the nectarine. 

Among familiar woodland fruits dispersed by 
birds I may mention the elderberry, the dogwood, 
the honeysuckle, the whortleberry, the holly, the 
cuckoo-pint, the barberry, and the spindle-tree. 
The white berries of the mistletoe, which is a 
parasitic plant, are eaten by the missel-thrush, a 
bird who has a special affection for this particu- 
lar food. But they are very sticky, and the seeds 
therefore adhere to the bird's beak and feet. To 
get rid of them, he rubs them off on the fork of a 
poplar branch, or in the bark of an apple-tree, 
which are the exact places where the mistletoe 
most desires to place itself. Many such close 
correspondences between bird and fruit exist in 
nature. 

Our northern berries are chiefly designed to be 
eaten by small birds like robins and hawfinches. 
But in southern climates larger fruits exist, 
adapted to the tastes of larger animals such as 
parrots, toucans, hornbills, fruit-bats, and mon- 



WHAT PLANTS DO FOR THEIR YOUNG. 157 

keys. Our own small kinds can generally be 
eaten whole, like the currant and the strawberry; 
but these large southern fruits have often a bitter 
or unpleasant or very thick rind, which the birds 
or monkeys, for whose use they are intended, 
know how to strip off them. Cases in point are 
the orange, the lemon, the shaddock, the banana, 
the pine-apple, the mango, the custard-apple, and 
the breadfruit. The melon, cucumber, pumpkin, 




Fig. 46. Fig. 47. Fig. 48. 

Adhesive fruits. Fig-. 46, of houndstongue. Fig. 47, of cleavers. 
Fig. 48, of herb-bennet. 

gourd, vegetable marrow, and water-melon are 
other southern forms cultivated in the north for 
the sake of their fruits. In the pomegranate the 
fruit itself is a dry capsule, but the seeds are each 
enclosed in a separate juicy coat. The grape is 
a fruit too well known to require detailed de- 
scription. 

As flowers sometimes club together, so also do 
fruits. In the mulberry the apparent berry is 
really made up of the distinct carpels of several 
separate flowers, which grow together as they 



158 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

ripen ; while the fig is a hollow stalk, in which 
numerous tiny fruits, commonly called seeds, are 
closely embedded. 

In all these cases animals act as willing agents 
in the dispersal of fruits or seeds. But some- 
times the plant compels them to carry its seeds 
against their will. Thus the fruits of the hounds- 
tongue (Fig. 46) consist of four small nuts, covered 
with hook-like prickles, which cling to the coats 
of sheep or cattle. The beasts rub these annoy- 
ing burdens off against bushes or hedges, and so 
disseminate the seeds in suitable places for ger- 
mination. The double fruit of cleavers (Fig. 47) 
is also supplied with similar prickles, while that 
of herb-bennet (Fig. 48) has a long curved awn 
which makes it catch at once on any passing 
animal. 

There are a large number of fruits, however, 
with richly stored seeds, which desire rather to 
escape the notice of animals, some of whom, like 
squirrels and dormice, try to make their living 
out of them. These we call nuts. Their tactics 
are the exact opposite of those pursued by the 
edible fruits. For the edible fruits strive to 
attract animals to disperse them; the nuts, on 
the contrary, having the actual seed richly stored 
with oils and starches, desire to protect it from 
being eaten and destroyed. Hence they are 
generally green when on the tree, so as to 
escape notice, and brown when lying on the 
ground beneath it. Cases of these protectively- 
arranged fruits, with hard shells and often with 
nauseous external coverings (some of which are 
not regarded as nuts in the strict botanical 
sense), are the walnut, the hazel-nut, the coco- 



WHAT PLANTS DO FOR THEIR YOUNG. 159 

nut, the chestnut, the acorn, the lime-nut, the 
almond, and the hickory-nut. In the Brazil nut 
the seeds (which are what we commonly call the 
nuts) are enclosed in a solid shell like that of a 
coco-nut, and are themselves also hard and nut- 
like. In the chestnut the fruit is a prickly cap- 
sule, inside which lie the seeds, which we know 
as chestnuts. 

But why have some plants so many seeds and 
some so few ? Well, the simpler and earlier 
types produce a very large number of ill-pro- 
vided seeds, which they turn loose upon the 
world to shift for themselves almost from the 
outset. Many of them perish, but a few survive. 
On the other hand, the more advanced plants, 
as a rule, produce only a small number of seeds, 
but each of these is well provided with starches 
and oils for the growth of the young plant ; and 
as most such survive, any tendency in the direc- 
tion of laying by food-stuffs would of course be 
favoured by natural selection. Just so among 
animals, a codfish produces nearly a million eggs, 
of which only two or three on an average survive 
to maturity ; while a bird produces half a dozen 
large and well-stored eggs, and a cow or a horse 
rarely brings forth more than one calf or foal at 
a birth. Decrease in the number of seeds is a fair 
rough test of relative progress. 

In nuts, you can see at once, the seeds are 
very richly stored, and the young plant starts in 
life, able to draw for a time on these ready-made 
food-stuffs, until its green leaves are in a position 
to lay by starches and protoplasm in plenty for 
it. It draws by degrees upon the accumulated 
materials. Such plants are like capitalists who 



160 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

can start their sons well in life with a good be- 
ginning. On the other hand, the poppy has to 
set out on its career with a very poor equipment ; 
it must begin picking up carbonic acid for itself 
almost from the outset. Such plants are like 
street arabs, compelled to shift as best they can 
from their earliest days. A coco-nut starts so 
well that the young palm can gfow to a consider- 
able size without working for itself; so to a less 
degree do walnuts, hazels, and oak-trees. Among 
other sets of plants there are two great groups 
which have especially learned to lay by foods for 
their seedlings — the pearlower family and the 
grasses. In both these cases the young plants 
start in life with exceptional advantages. But 
what will feed a young plant will also feed an 
animal. Hence men live largely in different 
countries off such richly-stored seeds — among 
nuts, the coco-nut, the chestnut, and the walnut ; 
among peaflower seeds, the pea, the bean, the 
vetch, the lentil ; among grasses, wheat, rice, 
barley, Indian corn, rye, millet. 

Recollect, however, that in all these cases the 
plant does not desire the seed to be eaten. It 
stored the tissues richly for its own sake and its 
offspring's alone, and we come and rob it. So, 
too, with the edible roots or tubers, such as 
potatoes, yams, turnips, beet-root, and so forth ; 
the plant meant to use them for its own future 
growth ; man appropriates them and disappoints 
its natural expectations. It is quite different 
with the succulent fruits, like the date and the 
plantain, which form in many countries the staple 
food of great populations ; nature meant those to 
be eaten by animals, and offered the pulp in re- 
turn for the benefit of dispersion. 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. l6l 

Finally, when the seed is put into the ground 
and exposed to warmth and moisture, it begins to 
germinate. This it does by sending up a small 
growing shoot towards the light, which soon de- 
velops green leaves; as well as by sending down 
a root towards the earth, which soon begins to 
suck up water, together with the dissolved nitroge- 
nous matter. That is the beginning of a fresh 
plant-colony, which thus owes its existence to two 
separate individuals, a father and a mother. The 
seed consists of two first seed-leaves in the five- 
fold plants, as you can see very well in a sprout- 
ing bean, and of one such seed-leaf in the three- 
fold division, as you can see very well in a sprout- 
ing grain of wheat, or, still better, a lily seed. 
These earliest leaves are technically known as 
seed-leaves or cotyledons, and that is why the five- 
fold plants are known to botanists by the awk- 
ward name of dicotyledons, while the threefold are 
called monocotyledons. These names mean merely 
plants with two or with one seed-leaf. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 

You may have observed that so far I have 
told you a good deal about leaves and roots, flow- 
ers and seeds, but little or nothing about the na- 
ture of the stems and branches that bear them. 
I have done this on purpose; for my object has 
been to give you as much information at a time 
as you could then and there understand, building 
up by degrees your conception of plant economy. 
ii 



162 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

Now, leaves and flowers are, so to speak, the units 
of the plant-colony, while stem and branches are 
the community as a whole and the mode of its 
organisation. You must know something about 
the component parts before you can get to under- 
stand the whole built up of them ; you must have 
seen the individual citizens themselves before you 
can comprehend the city or nation composed by 
their union. 

The stem, then, is the part of the plant-colony 
which does not consist of individual leaves, either 
digestive or floral, but which binds them all to- 
gether, raises them visibly to the air, and supplies 
them with water, nitrogenous matter, and the re- 
sults of previous assimilation elsewhere. The 
stem and branches are common property, as it 
were ; they belong to the community : they repre- 
sent the scaffolding, the framework, the canals, 
the roads, the streets, the sewers, of the com- 
pound plant-colony. 

How did stems begin to exist at all ? The 
most probable answer to that question we owe, 
not to any professional botanist, but to our great 
philosopher, Mr. Herbert Spencer. 

The simplest and earliest plants, we saw, were 
mere small floating cells, endowed with active 
chlorophyll. Next in the upward order of evolu- 
tion came rows of such cells, arranged in long 
lines, like hairs or threads, or like pearls in a neck- 
lace, as in the green ooze of ponds and lakelets. 
Above these simple plants, again, come flat ex- 
panded collections of cells, as in the fronds of 
seaweeds. Now, all these kinds of plant are stem- 
less. But suppose in such a plant as the last, one 
frond or leaf took to growing out of the middle 
of another, as it actually does in many instances, 





THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 163 

we should get the beginning of a compound plant, 
many-leaved, and with a sort of early or nascent 
stem, formed by the part that was common to 
many of the leaves, like 
a midrib. The accom- 
panying diagram (Fig. 
49) will make this clear- 
er than any amount of 
description could pos- 
sibly make it. Start- 
ing from such a point, 
certain plants would 
soon find they were 
thus enabled to over- 
top others, and to ob- 
tain freer access to x 

... . . . . , r ig. 40. — First steps in the evolu- 

light and carbonic acid. tion of the stem. 

Gradually, natural se- 
lection would ensure that the common central part 
of the growing plant, the developing stem, should 
become harder and more resisting than the rest, so 
as to stand up against the wind and other oppos- 
ing forces. At last there would thus arise a 
clearly-marked trunk, simple at first, but later on 
branching, which would lift the leaves and flowers 
to a considerable height, and hang them out in 
such a way as to catch the sunlight and air to the 
best advantage, or to attract the fertilising insects 
or court the wind under the fairest conditions. I 
leave you to think out for yourself the various 
stages of the process by which natural selection 
must in the end secure these desirable objects. 

In order to understand the nature of the stem, 
in its fully developed form, however, we must re- 
member that it has three main functions. The 



164 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

first is, to raise the foliage, with the flowers and 
fruits as well, visibly above the surface of the 
ground on which they grow, so that the leaves 
may gain the freest possible access to rays of sun- 
light and to carbonic acid, while the flowers and 
fruit may receive the attentions of insects and 
birds, or other fertilising and distributing agents. 
The second is, to conduct from the root to the fo- 
liage and other growing parts what is commonly 
called the raw sap — that is to say, the body of 
water absorbed by the rootlets, together with the 
nitrogenous matter and food-salts dissolved in it, 
all of which are needed for the ultimate manu- 
facture of protoplasm and chlorophyll. The third 
is, to carry away and distribute the various ma- 
tured products of plant life, such as starches, 
sugars, oils, and protoplasm, from the places in 
which they are produced (such as the leaves) to 
the places where they are needed for building up 
the various parts of the compound organism (such 
as the flowers and fruit or the growing shoots), as 
well as to the places where such materials are to 
be stored up for safety or for future use (as, for 
example, the tubers and roots, or the buds, bulbs, 
and other dormant organs). Each of these three 
essential functions we must now proceed to con- 
sider separately. 

In order to raise the leaves and branches visi- 
bly above the ground into the air above it, the 
stem is made much stronger and stouter than the 
ordinary leaf-tissue. If the plant does not rise 
very high above the ground, indeed, as in the 
case of small herbs, and especially of annuals, its 
stem need not be very hard or stiff, and is often 
in point of fact quite green and succulent. But 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 165 

just in proportion as plants grow tall and spread- 
ing, carry masses of foliage, and are exposed to 
heavy winds, do they need to form a stout and 
woody stem, which shall support the constant 
weight of the leaves, or even bear up under the 
load of snow which may cover the boughs in win- 
try weather. Thus, a tapering tree like the Scotch 
fir requires a comparatively smaller stem than an 
oak, because its branches do not spread far and 
wide, while its single leaves are thin and needle- 
like; whereas the oak, with its massive boughs 
extending far and wide on every side, and cov- 
ered with a weight oflarge and expanded absorb- 
ent leaves, requires a peculiarly thick and but- 
tressed stem to support its burden. Both in girth 
and in texture it must differ widely from the loose 
and swaying pine-tree. Every stem is thus a 
piece of ingenious engineering architecture, adapt- 
ed on the average to the exact weight it will have 
to bear, and the exact strains of wind and weather 
to which on the average it may count upon being 
exposed in the course of its life-history. We see 
the result of occasional failure of adaptation in 
this respect after every great storm, when the 
corn in the fields is beaten down by hail, or the 
fir-trees in the forest are snapped off short like 
straw by the force of the tempest. But the sur- 
vivors in the long run are those which have suc- 
ceeded best in resisting even such unusual stresses ; 
and it is they that become the parents of after 
generations, which of course inherit their powers 
of resistance. 

Most stems, at least of perennial plants, and 
all those of bushes, shrubs, and forest trees, are 
strengthened for the purpose of resisting such 
strains by means of a material which we call 



1 66 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

wood. And what is wood ? Well, it is an ex- 
tremely hard and close-grained tissue, manufac- 
tured by the plant out of its ordinary cells by a 
deposit on their walls of thickening matter. This 
process of thickening goes on in each cell until 
the hollow of the centre is almost entirely filled 
up by the thickening material, leaving only a 
small vacant space in the very middle. The 
thickening matter, which consists for the most 
part of carbon and hydrogen, is built up there 
by the protoplasm of the cell itself: but as soon 
as the process is quite complete, the protoplasm 
emigrates from the cell entirely, and goes to some 
other place where it is more urgently needed. 
Thus wood is made up of dead cells, whose walls 
are immensely thickened, but whose living con- 
tents have migrated elsewhere. 

In large perennial stems, like those of oaks 
and elms, a fresh ring of wood is added each 
year outside the ring of the last growing season. 
This new ring of wood is interposed between the 
bark (of which I shall speak presently) and the 
older wood of the core or heart, which was simi- 
larly laid down when the tree was younger. In 
this way, the number of rings, one inside another, 
enables us roughly to estimate the age of a tree 
when we cut it down ; though, strictly speaking, 
we can only tell how many times growth in its 
trunk was renewed or retarded. Still, as a fair 
general test, the number of rings in a trunk give 
us an approximate idea of the age of the indi- 
vidual tree that produced it. 

The principle is only true, however, of the 
great group of dicotyledonous trees, such as beeches 
or ashes, as well as of the pines and other coni- 
fers. In monocotyledonoiis trees, like the palms and 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 167 

bamboos, the stem does not increase in quite the 
same way from within outward, and there are 
therefore no rings of annual growth to judge by. 
Palms rise from the ground as big or nearly as 
big at the beginning as they will ever be in the 
end ; and though each year they rise higher and 
higher into the air, and produce a fresh bunch of 
leaves at their summit, they seldom branch, and 
they never produce large buttressed stems like 
the oak or the chestnut. 

The second main function of the stem is to 
convey the raw sap absorbed by the roots to the 
leaves and branches, and especially to the grow- 
ing points. This is such a very important element 
in plant life that we must now consider it in some 
little detail. 

If you look for a moment at a great spreading 
oak-tree, with its top rising forty or fifty feet 
above the level of the ground, and its roots 
spreading as far and as deep beneath the earth, 
you will see at once how serious and difficult a 
mechanical problem it is for the plant to raise 
up water from so great a depth to so great a 
height without the aid of pump or siphon. For 
the plant can no more work miracles than you or 
I can. Yet every leaf must be constantly supplied 
with water, that prime necessary of life, or it will 
wither and die ; and every growing part must ob- 
tain it in abundance, in order to give that plas- 
ticity and freedom which are needful for the earlier 
constructive processes. Protoplasm itself can ef- 
fect nothing without the assistance of water as a 
solvent for all materials it employs in its opera- 
tions. 

How does the plant get over these difficulties ? 



1 68 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

Well, the stem is well provided with a whole sys- 
tem of upward distributing vessels in which water 
may be conveyed to the various parts, just as 
it is conveyed in towns through the pipes and taps 
wherever it is needed. But what is the motive 
power for this mechanical work ? How does the 
plant raise so much liquid to such a considerable 
height, without the intervention of any visible 
and tangible machinery ? 

Two main agents are employed for this pur- 
pose. The one is known as root-pressure j the 
other as evaporation. 

I begin with the former. The cells of which 
roots are made up are most ingeniously constructed 
so as to exert this peculiar form of pressure. 
Each one of them has at its outer or free end, 
where it comes into contact with the moist earth, 
a wall of such a nature that it very readily ab- 
sorbs water, and allows the water so absorbed to 
flow freely through it inward. But once in, the 
water seems almost as if imprisoned in a pump; 
it cannot pass outward again, only inward and 
upward. You may compare the cell in this respect 
with those mechanical valves which yield readily 
to the pressure of fluids from outside, but instantly 
close when a fluid from inside attempts to pass 
through them. In this way the outer cells of the 
hairs on the roots, which come in contact with the 
moistened soil, get distended with water, and swell 
and swell, till at last their walls will give no long- 
er, and their own elasticity forces the water out 
of them. But the water cannot flow back ; so it 
has to flow forward. Again, each cell or vessel 
which the stream afterwards enters is construct- 
ed on just the same general principle as the ab- 
sorbent root-cells ; it allows water to pass into it 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 169 

freely from below upward, but does not allow it 
to pass back again from above downward. Thus 
we get a constant state of what is called turgidity 
in the lower cells; they are as full as they can 
hold, and they keep on contracting elastically, so 
as to expel the water they contain into other cells 
next in order above them. By means of such 
root-pressure, as it is called, raw sap is being for 
ever forced up from the soil beneath into the 
stem and branches, to supply the leaves with water 
and food-salts, especially in early spring, when 
the processes of growth are most active and 
vigorous. 

It is owing to this peculiar property of root- 
pressure that cut stems " bleed " or exude sap, 
especially in spring-time. The root-pressure con- 
tinues of itself in spite of the fact that the stem 
has been divided ; and the sap absorbed by the 
roots is thus forced out at the other end by the 
continuous elasticity of the cells and vessels. 
The fact that severed stems will thus " bleed " or 
exude raw sap shows in itself the reality of root- 
pressure. 

But root-pressure alone would not fully suffice 
to raise so large a body of water as the plant re- 
quires to so great a height above the earth's sur- 
face. It is therefore largely supplemented and 
assisted by the second or subsidiary power of 
evaporation. This evaporation, or " transpira- 
tion " as it is generally called, is just as necessary 
and essential to plants as breathing is to men and 
animals. 

We must therefore enter a little more fully 
here into the nature of so important and universal 
a plant function. You will remember that when 
we were discussing the nature of leaves, I gave 



170 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

you a woodcut of a thin slice through a leaf (Fig. 
1) which showed the blade as naturally divided 
into an upper and under portion. The upper por- 
tion consisted of very close-set green cells, con- 
taining living chlorophyll, and covered by a single 
transparent water-layer, which absorbed carbonic 
acid from the air about, and passed it on to be 
digested by the living chlorophyll-layer just be- 
neath it. But the under portion was sparse-look- 
ing and spongy; it was composed of cells loosely 
arranged among themselves, and interspersed with 
great empty spaces. I told you but little at the 
time of the function or use of this lower portion ; 
we must return to it now in the present connec- 
tion, as a component element in the task of water- 
supply. 

The lower portion of most leaves is the part 
employed in the great and necessary work of 
evaporation. 

For this purpose the tissue at the under side 
of the leaf is composed of loose and spongy cells 
which have much of their surface exposed to the 
empty spaces between them : and these emp- 
ty spaces are really air-cavities. The object of 
the cavities, indeed, is to facilitate evaporation, 
Liquid transpires into them from the various cells 
through the wall that bounds them. How fast 
water evaporates in the leaves of plants we all 
know by experience in a thousand ways. We 
know, for instance, that if we pick bunches of 
flowers and leave them in the sun without water, 
they fade and dry up in a very short time. We 
also know that if we forget to water plants in 
pots, the plants similarly dry up and die after a 
few hours' exposure. Leaves, in fact, are pur- 
posely arranged in most cases so as to encourage 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 17 1 

a very rapid evaporation ; and evaporation is one 
of their chief means of raising water from the 
roots to the growing and living portions. 

If you examine the under side of a leaf under 
the microscope, you will find it is covered by 
hundreds of little pores which look exactly like 
mouths, and which are guarded by two cells whose 
resemblance to lips is absurdly obvious. These 
pores are commonly known to botanists by the 
awkward name of stoinata, which is the Greek for 
mouths; and mouths they really are to all exter- 
nal appearance. You must not suppose, however, 
that they are truly mouths in the sense of being 
the organs with which the plant eats; the upper 
surface of the leaf, as we saw, with its layer of 
water-cells and its assimilating chlorophyll-bodies, 
really answers in the plant to our mouths and 
stomachs. The stomata or pores are much more 
like the openings in the skin by which we per- 
spire ; only perspiration or evaporation is an even 
more important part of life to the plant than it is 
to the animal. Each of the stomata opens into an 
air-cavity; and through it the liquid evaporated 
from the cells passes out as vapour into the open 
air. Many leaves have thousands of such pores 
on their lower surface; they may easily be rec- 
ognised under the microscope by means of the 
curious guard-cells which look like lips, and which 
give the pores, in fact, their strange mouth-like 
aspect. 

What is the use of these lips ? Well, they are 
employed for opening and closing the evaporat- 
ing pores, or stomata. In dry weather it is not 
desirable that the pores should be open, for then 
evaporation should be limited as far as possible. 
So, under these conditions, the lips contract, and 



172 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

the pore closes. Excessive evaporation at such 
times would, of course, damage or destroy the 
foliage ; the plant desires rather to store up and 
retain its stock of moisture. But after rain, and 
in damp weather, the roots suck up abundant 
water; and then it becomes desirable that evapo- 
ration should go on, and the leaves and grow- 
ing shoots should be supplied with liquid food, 
as well as with the nitrogenous matter and salts 
dissolved in it. Hence at such times the pores 
open wide, and allow the water in the form of 
vapour to exude from them freely. 

The object of this evaporation, again, is two- 
fold. In the first place, it supplements root- 
pressure as a means of raising water to the leaves 
and growing shoots; and in the second place, by 
getting rid of superfluous liquid, it leaves the 
nitrogenous material and the food-salts in a more 
concentrated form, at the very points where they 
are just then needed for the formation of fresh liv- 
ing protoplasm and other useful constructive fac- 
tors of plant-life. But how does evaporation raise 
water from the ground? In this way. The liv- 
ing contents of each cell on the upward path 
have a natural chemical affinity for water, and 
will suck it up greedily wherever they can get it. 
Thus each part, as fast as it loses water by 
evaporation, takes up more water in turn from 
its next neighbour below ; and that once more 
withdraws it from the cell beneath it ; and so on 
step by step until we reach the actual absorbent 
root-hairs. Root-pressure by itself could not 
raise water as high as we often see it raised in 
great forest trees and tropical climbers; it has 
not enough mechanical motor power. But here 
evaporation comes in, to aid it in its task ; and 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 173 

the real motor power in this last case is the very 
potent force of chemical attraction. 

What I have said here about evaporation, and 
the way it is conducted by means of pores on the 
surface of the leaves, is true of the vast majority 
of green plants ; but considerable varieties and 
modifications occur, of course, in accordance 
with the necessities of various situations. For 
example, the brooms and many other shrubs of 
the same twiggy type have few green leaves, but 
in their stead produce lithe green stems, filled 
with active chlorophyll. These stems and branches 
do all the work usually performed by ordinary 
foliage. Stems and twigs of this type are cov- 
ered with mouth-like pores, or stomata, in exactly 
the same way as the under side of leaves in most 
other species. Similarly, the very flattened leaf- 
like branches of the butcher's broom, and of the 
Australian acacias and other Australasian trees, 
are well supplied with like pores for purposes of 
evaporation. Again, while the pores are usually 
found on the under surface of the leaf, they are 
situated on the upper surface of leaves which float 
on water, like the water-lily and the water-crow- 
foot ; because in such plants they would be obvi- 
ously useless for purposes of evaporation on the 
lower side, which is in contact with the water. 
Some leaves have the stomata on both sides alike, 
especially when no one side is much more ex- 
posed to sunlight than another. But wherever 
they are found, they always lie above masses of 
loose and spongy cell-tissue, in whose meshes and 
air-spaces evaporation can go on readily. 

On the other hand, as I noted before, leaves 
which grow in very dry or desert situations re- 
quire as much as possible to curtail evaporation. 



174 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

Such leaves are therefore usually thick and fleshy, 
and possess a very small allowance of pores. The 
forms of several leaves, again, are largely de- 
pendent upon the necessity for keeping the pores 
free from wetting, and promoting evaporation 
whenever it is needful for the plant's health and 
growth; and this is particularly the case with 
what are called " rolled leaves," such as one sees 
in the heaths and the common rock-roses. Many 
such additional principles have always to be taken 
into consideration in attempting to account for 
the various shapes of foliage: indeed, we can 
only rightly understand the form of any given 
leaf when we know all about its habits and its 
native situation. 

The stem, then, besides raising the leaves and 
flowers, for which purpose it is often strengthened 
by means of mechanical woody tissue, also acts 
as a conductor of raw sap from the tips of the 
roots to the leaves and growing points, for which 
purpose it is further provided with an elaborate 
system of canals and vessels, running direct from 
the absorbent root to all parts of the compound 
plant community. 

The third function of the stem and branches 
is to convey and distribute the elaborated prod- 
ucts of plant-chemistry and plant-manufacture 
from the places where they are made to the 
places where they are needed for practical pur- 
poses. 

We saw long since that starches, sugars, pro- 
toplasms, and chlorophyll are manufactured in 
the leaves under the influence of sunlight; and 
from the materials so manufactured every part of 
the plant must ultimately be constructed. But 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 1 75 

we never said a word at the time about the means 
by which the materials in question were carried 
about and distributed to the various organs in 
need of them. Nevertheless, a moment's con- 
sideration will show you that new leaves and 
shoots must necessarily be built up at the expense 
of materials supplied by the older ones; that 
flowers, fruits, and seeds must be constructed 
from protoplasm handed over for their use by the 
neighbouring foliage. Nay more; the root itself 
grows and spreads; and the very tips of the 
roots, which themselves of course can manufac- 
ture nothing, must be supplied from above with 
most active and discriminating protoplasm, to 
guide their movements. Whence do they get it ? 
From the factory in the foliage. Thus, from the 
summit of the tallest tree down to the lowest 
root that fastens it in the soil, there runs a com- 
plex system of pipes and tubes for the special 
conveyance of elaborated material ; and this sys- 
tem supplies every growing part with the food- 
stuff necessary for its particular growth, and 
every living part with the food-stuff necessary 
for maintaining its life and activity. An inter- 
change of protoplasmic matter, starches, and 
sugars, goes on continually through the entire 
organism. 

This downward and outward stream of living 
matter, carrying along with it live protoplasm 
and other foods or manufactured materials, must 
be carefully distinguished from the upward stream 
of crude sap which rises from the roots to the 
leaves and branches. The one contains only such 
raw materials of life as are supplied by the soil — 
namely, nitrogenous matter, water, and food- 
salts ; the other contains the things eaten from 



176 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

the air by the plant in its leaves, and afterwards 
worked up by it into sugars, starches, protoplasm, 
and chlorophyll. 

Stems are usually covered outside for purposes 
of protection by a more or less thick integument, 
which in trees and shrubs assumes the corky form 
we know as bark. Bark consists of dead and 
empty cells, thickened with a lighter thickening 
matter than wood, and presenting as a rule a 
rather spongy appearance. But beneath the bark 
comes a distinct layer of living material, inter- 
posed between the corky dead cells of the integu- 
ment and the woody dead cells of the interior. 
This living layer extends over stem, twigs, and 
branches : it forms the binding and connecting 
portion of the entire plant community ; it links 
together in one united whole the living material 
of the leaves and shoots with the living material 
of the roots and rootlets. It is thus the stem, 
above all, that gives to the complex plant colony 
of foliage and flowers whatever organic unity and 
individuality it ever possesses. 

All situations, however, are not alike. Just as 
here this sort of leaf succeeds, and there that, so 
in stems and branches, here this form does best, 
and there again the other. The shape of the stem 
and branches, in fact, is the shape of the entire 
plant colony ; and it is arranged to suit, on the 
average of instances, the convenience of all its 
component members. Much depends on the shape 
of the leaves ; much on the conditions of wind or 
calm, shade or sunshine. 

Some plants are annuals. These require no 
large and permanent stem ; they spring from the 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 177 

seed each year, like peas, or wheat, or poppies; 
they make a stem and leaves ; they produce their 
flowers ; they set, and ripen, and scatter their 
seed ; and then they wither away and are done 
with for ever. Hundreds of such plants occur in 
our fields and gardens. Even these annuals, how- 
ever, differ greatly in the amount of their stem and 
branches. Some are quite low, humble, and suc- 
culent, like chickweed and sandwort ; others have 
tall and comparatively stout stems, like wheat, 
oats, and barley, or still more, like the sunflower. 
As a rule, annuals are not very large ; but a few 
rich seeds produce strong young plants which 
even within a single year attain an astounding 
size ; this is the case with the garden poppy, 
the tobacco plant, and the Indian corn, and even 
more so with certain climbing annuals, such as 
the gourd, the cucumber, the melon, and the 
pumpkin. 

Many plants, however, find it pays them better 
to produce a hard and woody stem, which lasts 
from year to year, and enables them to put forth 
fresh leaves and shoots in each succeeding season. 
Among these, again, great varieties exist. Some 
have merely a rather short and stout stem with 
many bundles of water-vessels, as in the pink and 
the wallflower. Their growth is herbaceous. Others, 
however, produce that more solid form of tissue 
which we know as wood, and w T hich is made up of 
cells whose walls have become much thickened 
and hardened. Among the woody group, again, 
we may distinguish many intermediate varieties, 
from the mere shrub or bush, like the heath and 
the broom, through small trees like the rhododen- 
dron, the lilac, the hawthorn, and the holly, to 
such great, spreading monsters of the forest as 
12 



178 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

the oak, the ash, the pine, the chestnut, and the 
maple. 

Once more, some plants produce an under- 
ground stem, and send up from this fresh annual 
branches. That is the case with hops, with 
meadow-sweet, and with buttercup, as well as 
with many of our garden flowers. When a plant 
becomes perennial, it is a mere question of its 
own convenience whether it chooses to produce a 
thick and woody stem, like trees and bushes, or to 
lay up material in undergound roots, stocks, and 
branches, like the potato, the dahlia, the lilies, 
the bulbous buttercup, the crocus, the iris, the 
Jerusalem artichoke, and the meadow orchis. 

Ordinary people divide most plants into three 
groups — herbs, shrubs, and trees. But I think 
you will have seen from what I have just said 
that in every great family of plants different 
kinds have found it worth while to adopt any one 
of these forms at will, according to circumstances. 
Trees, in other words, do not form a natural 
group by themselves; any family of plant may 
happen to develop a tree-like species. Thus the 
herb-like clover and the tall tree-like laburnum are 
closely related peaflowers. Most of the com- 
posites are mere herbs or shrubs, but a very few 
of them in the South Sea Islands have grown into 
large and much-branched trees. The grasses are 
mainly herbs ; but some of them, like the bam- 
boos, have developed tall and tree-like stems, 
much branched and feathery. 

Take the single family of the roses, for ex- 
amplej so familiar to most of us ; some of them 
are mere annual weeds, like the tiny parsley-piert 
that occurs as a pest in every garden. Others, 
again, are perennials with low tufted stems, like the 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. 179 

strawberry ; or creeping, like the cinquefoil ; or 
rising into a spike, like the burnet and the agri- 
mony. Yet others become scrambling bushes, 
like the blackberry and the raspberry. In the 
blackthorn and the hawthorn the bush has be- 
come more erect and tree-like. Both types of 
growth occur in the dog-rose and many other 
roses. The cherry attains the size and stature of 
a small tree. The mountain-ash is bigger ; the 
apple-tree bigger still ; while the pear often 
grows to a considerable height and much spread- 
ing dignity. These are all members of the rose 
family. Here, therefore, every variety of shape 
and size is well represented within the limits of a 
single order. 

One word must be given to the varieties of 
the stem. Sometimes, as in the oak, the trunk is 
much branched and intricate ; sometimes, as in 
the date-palm, simple and unbranched, bearing 
only a single tuft of circularly arranged leaves. 
But the most interesting in this respect are the 
climbing and twisting stems, which do not take 
the trouble to support themselves, but lean for aid 
upon the trunk of some stronger and more upright 
neighbour. Stems of this sort are familiar to us 
all in the hop and the bindweed. In other climb- 
ers the stems do not twine to any great extent, 
but the plants support themselves by root-like 
processes, as in ivy, or by tendrils, as in the vine, 
or by twisted leaf-stalks, as in the canary creeper. 
Others cling by means of suckers, as the Ampelop- 
sis Veitchii, or hang by opposite leaves, like clem- 
atis, or cling by hooked hairs, as is the case with 
cleavers. In certain instances, such creeping or 
climbing plants tend to become parasitic — that is 
to say, they fasten themselves by sucker-like 



180 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

mouths to the bark of the harder plant up which 
they climb, and feed upon its already elaborated 
juices. Our English dodder is an example of 
such a plant. It has no leaves of its own, but 
consists entirely of a mass of red stems, bearing 
clusters of pretty pale pink flowers. 

Other plants show another form of parasitism. 
Mistletoe is one of these. It fastens itself to a 
poplar or an apple-tree (very seldom an oak) and 
sucks its juices. But it has also green leaves of 
its own, which do real work of eating and assimi- 
lating as well. It is therefore not quite such a 
parasite as the dodder. Several plants are simi- 
larly half-parasitic on the roots of wheat and 
grasses. Among them I may mention, as English 
instances, the cow-wheat, the yellow rattle, and 
the pretty little eyebright. 

Broomrape is a parasite of a different sort. 
It grows on the roots of clover, and has no true 
leaves ; in their place it produces short scales, 
which contain no chlorophyll. Several other 
plants are also devoid of chlorophyll, and there- 
fore cannot eat carbonic acid for themselves. 
They live like animals on materials laid by for 
them by other plants. Such are toothwort, a pale 
rose-coloured leafless plant, with pretty spiked 
flowers, which grows by suckers on the roots of 
hazel-trees. The bird's-nest orchid, a delicate 
brown plant with curious ghost-like blossoms, 
feeds rather on the organised matter in decaying 
leaves among thick beechwoods. In this book I 
have purposely confined your attention for the 
most part to the true green plants, which are the 
central and most truly plant-like type; but I 
ought to tell you now that a great many plants, 
especially among the lower kinds, behave in this 



THE STEM AND BRANCHES. l8l 

respect much more like animals: instead of 
manufacturing fresh starches and protoplasms 
for themselves from carbonic acid, under the in- 
fluence of sunlight, they eat up what has already 
been made by other and more industrious species. 
Such plants are retrograde. They are products 
of degeneracy. Among them I may specially 
mention all the fungi, like mushrooms, toadstools, 
mould, and mildew, as well as the bacilli and bac- 
teria, microscopic and degenerate plants which 
cause decomposition. Their life is more like that 
of animals than of true vegetables. 

In tropical forests, where the soil is almost 
monopolised by huge spreading trees, the smaller 
plants have been forced to secure their fair share 
of light and air by somewhat different means 
from those which are common in cooler climates. 
Many of them, without being parasitic, have 
learnt to attach themselves by their roots to the 
outer bark of the trees, and so to get at the 
light, no ray of which ever struggles through 
the living canopy of green in the dense jungle. 
These plants have green leaves, and eat for 
themselves ; but they use the boughs of their 
host instead of soil to root themselves in. Such 
plants are technically known as epiphytes. This 
is the mode of life of most of the handsome 
orchids cultivated in our conservatories. 

Now let us recapitulate. The stem unites the 
various parts of the plant — the root, the leaves, 
the flowers, the fruit. It conducts water and 
nitrogenous matter from the soil to the foliage. 
It also carries the manufactured materials from 
the points where they are made to the points 



1 82 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

where they are wanted for the growth of fresh 
organs. It supports and raises the whole plant 
colony. Finally, it stores up material in drought 
or winter, which it uses for new branches, leaves, 
or flowers, when rain or spring or favourable 
conditions in due time come round again. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 

We have considered so far the various ele- 
ments which go to make up the life of plants — 
how they eat and drink, how they digest and 
assimilate, how they marry and get fertilised, how 
they produce their fruit and set their seeds, final- 
ly how they are linked together in all their parts 
by stem and vessels into a single community. 
But up to the present moment we have con- 
sidered these elements in isolation only, as so 
many processes the union of which makes up 
what we call the life of an oak, or a lily, or a 
strawberry plant. In order really to understand 
how all these principles work together in prac- 
tical action, we ought to take a few specimen lives 
of real concrete plants, and trace them through 
direct, from the cradle to the grave, with all their 
vicissitudes. I propose, therefore, in this chapter 
to give you brief sketches of one or two such life- 
histories; and I hope these few hints may encour- 
age you to find out many more for yourself, by 
personal study of plants in their native sur- 
roundings. 

" In their native surroundings," I say, since 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 183 

all life is really, in Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous 
phrase, "adaptation to the environment;" and 
therefore we can only understand and discover 
the use and meaning of each part or organ by 
watching the plant in its own home, and among 
the general conditions by which it and its ances- 
tors have always been limited. It would be im- 
possible, for example, to see the use of the thick 
outer covering of the coconut (from which coco- 
nut matting is manufactured) if we did not know 
that the coconut palm grows naturally by the sea- 
shore in tropical islands, and frequently drops its 
fruits into the water beneath it. The nuts are 
thus carried by the waves and currents from islet 
to islet ; and the coconut palm, which is a deni- 
zen of sea-sand, owes to this curious method of 
water-carriage its wide dispersion among the 
coral-reefs of the Pacific. But a plant that is so 
dispersed must needs make provision against 
wetting, bruising, and sinking in the sea; and 
since only those coconuts would get dispersed 
over wide spaces of water which happened to 
possess a good coating of fibre, the existing plant 
has come to produce the existing nut as we know 
it — richly stored with food for the young palm 
while it makes its first steps among the barren 
rocks and sand-banks, and well provided by its 
shaggy outer coat against the dangers of the sea, 
the reefs, and the breakers. Similarly, we could 
never understand the cactus except as a native 
of the dry plains of Mexico. Or again, there is 
an orchid in Madagascar with a spur containing 
honey at a depth of eighteen inches. Now, no 
European insect could possibly reach so deep a 
deposit ; but a Madagascar moth has a gigantic 
proboscis, exactly fitted for sucking the nectary 



184 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

and fertilising the flowers. Thus no plant can 
properly be understood apart from its native 
place; and 1 have therefore confined myself for 
the most part in these few brief life-histories to 
native British plants, whose circumstances and 
surroundings are known to everybody. 

As an example of a very simple and easy life- 
history, I will take first a little wayside weed, 
commonly known as whitlow-grass, but called by 
botanists, in their scientific Latin, Draba verna. 
This curious little herb is not a grass at all (as 
its name might make you think), but a member of 
the great family of the crucifers, succulent plants 
with four petals and six stamens in each flower, 
to which the cabbage, the turnip, the sea-kale, 
and many other well-known garden species be- 
long. But whitlow-grass is not a large and con- 
spicuous plant like any of these ; it is one of the 
smallest and shortest-lived of our British weeds. 
It has managed to carve itself out a place in na- 
ture on the dry banks and in clefts of rock during 
the few weeks in spring while such spots are as 
yet unoccupied by more permanent denizens. The 
herb starts from a very minute seed, dropped on 
the soil by the parent plant many months before, 
and patiently waiting its time to develop till win- 
ter frosts are over, and warmer weather and 
moisture begin to quicken its tiny seed-leaves. 
As soon as these have opened and used up theii 
very small stock of internal nutriment, the young 
plant begins to produce on its own account a 
rosette of little oblong green leaves, pressed close 
to the ground for warmth and shelter. They eat 
as they go, and make fresh leaves again out of 
the absorbed and assimilated material. Direct 
sunshine falls upon them full front; and as no 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 1 85 

other foliage overshadows them or competes in 
their neighbourhood for carbonic acid, they grow- 
apace into a little tuft of spreading leaves, about 
half an inch long or less, and forming in the mass 
a rough circle. For about a week or ten days the 
little mouths go on drinking in carbonic acid as 
fast as they can, and manufacturing it under the 
influence of sunlight into starches and proto- 
plasm. At the end of that time they have col- 
lected enough material to send up a slender blos- 
soming stem, about an inch high or more, bearing 
no leaves, but developing at the top a few tiny 
flower-buds. These shortly open and display 
their flowers, very small and inconspicuous, with 
four wee white petals, each so deeply cleft that 
they resemble eight to a casual observer. Inside 
the petals are six little active stamens; and inside 
the stamens again a two-celled ovary. The blos- 
soms are visited and fertilised on warm March 
mornings by small spring midges, attracted by 
the petals. They immediately set their seeds in 
tne flat green capsule, ripen them rapidly in the 
eye of the sun, and shed them at once, the whole 
life of the plant thus seldom exceeding three or 
four weeks in a favourable season. At the same 
time, the leaves and roots wither, as the material 
they contained is rapidly withdrawn from them, 
and used up in the process of maturing the seeds; 
so that as soon as the fruiting is quite complete, 
the plant dies down, having exhausted itself ut- 
terly in the tw T o short acts of flowering and seed- 
bearing. During the remaining ten months of 
the year or thereabouts, there are no more whit- 
low-grasses at all in existence ; the species re- 
mains dormant, as it were, for a whole long pe- 
riod in the form of seeds lying buried in the soil, 



1 86 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

and only springs to life again when the return of 
March gives it warning that its day has once 
more come round to it. 

Contrast with this brief and very spasmodic 
life of some thirty days the comparatively long 
though otherwise extremely similar biography of 
the Mexican agave, commonly cultivated in hot- 
houses in England, and largely grown in the open 
air in the South of Europe under the (incorrect) 
name of "American aloes." The agave is a large 
and strikingly handsome lily of the amaryllis fam- 
ily, about which I have already told you something 
in a previous chapter. It begins life as a small 
plant, like a London pride, springing from a com- 
paratively large and richly-stored seed on its own 
dry prairies. Its leaves, which spread in a rosette, 
are not unlike those of the house-leek in shape; 
they are very large, thick, and fleshy. But as they 
grow in the hot and dry climate of Mexico, an 
almost desert country, with a very small rainfall, 
they have a particularly hard outer skin, so as to 
prevent undue evaporation ; and they are pro- 
tected against the attacks of herbivorous animals 
by being spiny at the edges, and ending in a stout 
and dagger-like point of the most formidable de- 
scription. The centre of the plant is occupied by 
a sort of sheath of leaves, concealing the growing 
point. For several years the round bunch of outer 
leaves grows bigger and bigger, till it attains a 
diameter of ten or fifteen feet at the base, seem- 
ing still like a huge rosette, with hardly any visi- 
ble stem to speak of. Meanwhile these huge leaves 
are busy all the time, eating and assimilating, and 
storing up manufactured food-stuffs as hard as 
they can in their thick and swollen bases. After 
six or seven years in their native climate, the 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 187 

plant feels itself in a position to send up a flower- 
ing stalk, which is formed from the materials al- 
ready laid by in these immensely thick and richly- 
stored leaf bases. The stalk springs from the 
middle of the central leaf-sheath. In a very few 
weeks the agave has sent up from this point a 
huge flowering scape, twenty or thirty feet high, 
and a foot or fifteen inches thick at the bottom. 
On this scape it produces with extraordinary ra- 
pidity a vast number of large and showy yellow 
flowers, which look not unlike an enormous can- 
delabrum, with many divided branches. The plant 
is enabled to produce this immense flowering stem 
and these numerous flowers in so short a period, 
because it draws upon its large store of elaborated 
material for the purpose. But as the flowering 
stem rises, and the flowers unfold, and the big 
fruits and seeds develop and ripen, the leaves be- 
low grow gradually flaccid and empty ; and their 
bases shrink, being depleted of their store of valu- 
able food-stuffs; so that by the time the seeds are 
ripe, the whole plant is used up, having exhausted 
itself, like the tiny whitlow-grass, in the act of 
fruiting. It then dies down altogether, and. never 
recovers, though new plants or offsets usually de- 
velop at its base from side buds, after the original 
agave has begun to wither. In English hothouses 
it takes thirty or forty years before the agave has 
collected enough material to send up a stem and 
flower; hence the common exaggeration that it 
needs a hundred years for " the blossoming of an 
aloe." 

As a familiar example of a very different kind 
of perennial plant, we may take our English beech- 
tree. The beech sets out in life as a tender young 
seedling, which grows from a good-sized triangular 



1 88 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

nut, whose cotyledons are well-stored with food- 
stuffs for its early development. As the nut ger- 
minates, the cotyledons open out, become flat and 
green, like thick fleshy leaves, and begin to absorb 
carbonic acid from the air, which they work up at 
once with the material supplied by the tiny root 
into protoplasm and chlorophyll. In the angle 
between them a young shoot develops, which soon 
puts forth delicate blades of true foliage leaves; 
and these in turn grow and assimilate material 
under the influence of sunlight. In the first year 
the little beech-tree is but a tiny sapling, with a 
short stem, already woody; but year after year, 
this stem grows higher, branches out and divides, 
and slowly clothes itself in the smooth grey bark 
characteristic of the species. The particular way 
in which it branches is this : each autumn there is 
formed at the base of every leaf a winter bud, 
long and brown, and covered with close scales, 
which enable it to survive the cold of winter. 
When spring comes round again, each one of 
these buds develops in turn into a leafy branch, 
so that (accidents excepted) there are as many 
new branches or twigs every year as there were 
leaves on the tree in the preceding season. The 
young leaves and branches emerge slowly and 
cautiously from the buds in spring, for fear of 
frost ; they are protected at first by certain scaly 
brown coverings known as stipules. Gradually, 
however, as the weather grows warmer, the stip- 
ules fall off, and display the tender green leaves, 
exposed to the air, but still folded together. As 
soon as they can trust the season, however, the 
leaves unfold, though they are still thickly covered 
at the edges by protective hairs, which afterwards 
fall off. but which guard the fresh green chloro- 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 189 

phyll in the cells just at first both from chilly 
winds and from the injurious effect of excessive 
sunlight. Year after year the beech-tree grows 
by so subdividing and adding branch to branch; 
while its stem increases by yearly rings of growth, 
till it attains at length considerable dimensions. 

During many such seasons of growth the 
beech-tree does not flower; all the material it 
manufactures through the summer in its large 
flat leaves it lays by in its stem to supply the 
young shoots and branches at the beginning of 
the subsequent season. But at last, when it has 
reached the height and girth of a small tree, it 
begins to store up protoplasm and starches for 
blossom also. Some of its buds are now leaf- 
buds, but some are flower-buds, produced in 
autumn, and held over till April. In the spring 
these flower-buds lengthen and produce bunches 
of blossoms, which we call catkins, some of them 
males, and some females, but both sexes growing 
on the same tree together. They bloom, like 
most other catkins, in the early spring, while the 
leaves are still very little developed, so as to pre- 
vent the foliage from interfering with the carriage 
of the pollen. The males are produced in hang- 
ing clusters an inch or so long; while the females 
stand up in small globular bunches, on erect 
flower -stems. They are wind - fertilised ; and 
shortly after flowering, the male catkins drop 
off entire, having done their life-work, while the 
females swell out into the familiar husks or four- 
valved cups, containing each some two or three 
triangular nuts, richly stored with food-stuffs. 

The agave only flowers once, and then dies 
down, exhausted. But the beech goes on flower- 
ing for many years together, and grows mean- 



190 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

while larger and larger in bulk, its trunk increas- 
ing in girth, and becoming buttressed at the base, 
so as to support the large head of branches and 
the dense mass of foliage. For the boughs are 
so arranged that a great crown of leaves is ex- 
posed in summer to the sun and air at the outer 
circumference of the dome-shaped mass; and in 
this way every leaf gets its fair share of light and 
carbon, and interferes as little as possible with 
the work of its neighbours. Old beeches will 
grow to more than 100 feet in height, and live 
for probably three or four centuries. At last, 
however, their protoplasm grows old and seems 
to get enfeebled; the trunk decays, and the entire 
tree falls first into dotage, then dies by slow de- 
grees of pure senility. 

The common vetch is another familiar plant 
whose life-history introduces to us some totally 
different yet interesting features. It belongs to 
the wide-spread family of the peaflowers, to which 
I have already more than once alluded, and it 
takes its origin from a comparatively large and 
rich round seed, not unlike a pea, whose cotyle- 
dons are well stored with supplies of starch and 
other food-stuffs. It sends up at first a short 
spreading stem, which twines or trails over sur- 
rounding plants, developing as it goes very curi-' 
ous leaves of a compound character. Each leaf 
consists of five or six pairs of leaflets, placed op- 
posite one another on the common stalk in the 
feather-veined fashion. But the four or five leaf- 
lets at the end of each leaf-stalk do not develop 
any flat blade at all, and are quite unleaflike in 
appearance : they are transformed, indeed, into 
long, thin tendrils, which catch hold of neigh- 
bouring branches or stems of 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 191 

spirally round them, and so enable the vetch to 
climb up bodily in spite of its weak stem, and raise 
its leaves and flowers to the air and the sunlight. 

At the base of every leaf, again, you will find, 
if you look, two arrow-shaped appendages, which 
block the way up the stem towards the developing 
flowers for useless creeping insects such as steal 
the honey without assisting fertilisation. On each 
appendage is a curious black spot, the use or 
function of which is not apparent while the blos- 
soms are in the bud. But after a few weeks' 
growth, the vetch begins to produce solitary 
flowers in the angle of each upper leaf ; flowers 
of the usual pea-blossom type, but pink or red- 
dish purple, and handsome or attractive. These 
flowers contain abundant honey to allure the 
proper fertilising insects. Just as they open, 
however, the black spot on the arrow-headed 
appendages of the lower leaves, in whose angles 
there are no flowers, begins also to secrete a little 
drop of honey. 

What is the use of this device ? Well, if you 
watch the vetch carefully, you will soon see that 
ants, enticed by the smell of honey in the open- 
ing flowers, crawl up the stem in hopes of steal- 
ing it. But ants, as we know, are thieves, not 
fertilisers. As soon as they reach the first black 
spot, they stop and lick up the honey secreted 
by the gland, and then try to pass on to the next 
appendage above it. But the arrow-shaped barbs, 
turned back against the stem, block their further 
progress; and even if they manage to squeeze 
themselves through with an effort, they are met 
just above by another honey-gland and another 
barrier in the shape of a second arrow-shaped ap- 
pendage. No ant ever gets beyond the third or 



192 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

fourth barricade ; the device is efficient : the vetch 
thus offers blackmail to creeping thieves in the 
shape of stem-honey, in order to guard from their 
depredations the far more valuable and useful 
honey in the flowers, which is intended to attract 
the fertilising insects. 

When the purple flowers have in due time 
been fertilised, they produce long narrow pods, 
each containing about a dozen round pea-like 
seeds. As the pods ripen, the plant shrivels up, 
and usually dies away, leaving only the ripe seeds 
to represent its kind through the winter. But 
sometimes, in damp and luxuriant autumns, the 
stem struggles through the winter to a second 
season, and flowers again in the succeeding sum- 
mer. We express this fact as a rule by saying 
that the vetch is usually an annual, but occasion- 
ally a biennial. 

With most annuals, such as wheat or sunflower, 
the whole strength of the plant is used up in the 
production of seed ; and as soon as the seed is set, 
the plant dies immediately. Where annuals have 
the sexes on separate plants, however, the male 
plants die as soon as they have shed their pollen, 
their task being thus complete ; while the females 
live on till their seed has ripened. 

Common coltsfoot is another well-known plant 
whose life-history shows some points of great 
interest. It grows in the first instance from a 
feathery fruit, one-seeded and seed-like, which is 
carried by the wind, often from a great distance. 
These flying fruits alight at last upon some patch 
of bare or newly-turned soil, such as the bank of 
a stream where there has been lately a landslip, 
or the side of a railway cutting. These bare sit- 
uations alone suit the habits of the baby coltsfoot ; 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 193 

if the fruit happens to settle on a light soil, al- 
ready thickly covered with luxuriant vegetation, 
it cannot compete against the established possess- 
ors. But the winged fruits, being dispersed on 
every side, enable many young plants to start 
well in life on the poor stiff clays which best suit 
the constitution of this riverside weed. The seed- 
ling grows fast in such circumstances, and soon 
produces large angular leaves, very broad and 
thick, which in the adult plant have often a di- 
ameter of five or six inches. They are green 
above, where they catch the sunlight and devour 
carbonic acid ; but underneath they are covered 
with a thick white wool, which is there for a cu- 
rious and interesting purpose. The damp clay 
valleys and river glens where coltsfoot lives by 
choice are filled till noon every day with mist and 
vapour; and heavy dew is deposited there every 
night through the summer season. Now, if this 
dew were allowed to clog the evaporation pores 
or stomata on the leaves of coltsfoot, the plant 
would not be able to raise water or proceed with 
its work except for perhaps a few hours daily. 
To prevent this misfortune, the under side of the 
leaves is thickly covered with a white coat of wool, 
on which no dew forms, and off which water rolls 
in little round drops, as you have seen it roll off a 
serge table-cloth. By this ingenious device the 
coltsfoot manages to keep its evaporation pores 
dry and open, in spite of its damp and moisture- 
laden situation. One may say, indeed, that every 
point in the structure of every plant has thus 
some special purpose ; indeed, one large object of 
the study of plants is to enable us to understand 
and explain such hidden purposes in the economy 
of nature. 
13 



194 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

During its early life, once more, the young 
plant of coltsfoot is constantly engaged, like the 
whitlow-grass and the agave, in laying by mate- 
rial for its future flowering season. But it does 
not lay by, as they do, in its expanded leaves or 
other portions of its body visible above ground ; 
instead of that, it puts forth a creeping under- 
ground stem or root-stock, which pushes its way 
sideways through the tough clay soil, often for 
several feet, and sends up at intervals groups of 
large roundish leaves, such as I have already de- 
scribed, to work above ground for it. You might 
easily take each such group for a separate plant, 
unless you dug up the root-stock and saw that 
they were really the scattered foliage of one sub- 
terranean stem, which grows horizontally instead 
of upward. During the summer the coltsfoot lays 
by in this buried root-stock quantities of rich ma- 
terial for next year's leaves and for its future 
flowers. In winter the leaves die down, and you 
see not a trace of the plant above ground. But 
in very early spring, as soon as the soil thaws, 
certain special buds begin to sprout on the under- 
ground stem, and send up tall naked scapes or 
flower-stems, usually growing in tufts together, 
and each crowned by a single large fluffy yellow 
flower-head. These stems are covered below by 
short purplish scales; and their purple colouring 
matter enables them to catch and utilise to the 
utmost the scanty sunshine that falls upon the 
plant in chilly March weather. For this particu- 
lar colouring matter has the special property of 
converting the energy in rays of light into heat 
for warming the plant. The scape is also wrapped 
up in a sort of cottony wool, which helps to keep 
it warm; and the unopened flower-head turns 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 195 

downward at first for still further safety against 
chill or injury. These various devices enable the 
coltsfoot to blossom earlier in the season than 
almost any other insect-fertilised flower, and so to 
monopolise the time and attention of the first 
flower-haunting March insects. 

Coltsfoot is a composite by family ; so its 
flowers are collected together into a head, after 
the ancestral fashion, and enclosed by an invo- 
lucre which closely resembles a calyx. But the 
type of flower-head differs somewhat from that 
in any of the composite plans I have hitherto 
described for you, because its outer florets are 
not flat and ray-shaped, but strap-like or needle- 
shaped. The inner florets, however, are bell- 
shaped, and much like those of the common daisy. 
The naked scapes, each resembling to the eye a 
shoot of asparagus, and each crowned by a single 
fluffy yellow flower-head, are familiar objects on 
banks or railway cuttings in the first days of 
spring; I have known them open as early as the 
1 2th of January, in sunny weather. But they grow 
entirely without leaves, and are produced at the 
expense of the material laid up in the underground 
stem by last season's foliage. They blossom, are 
fertilised, set their seeds, turn into heads of white 
feathery down, and produce ripe fruits which 
blow away and get dispersed, all before the leaves 
begin to appear at all above the soil. Thus you 
never can see the foliage and flowers together ; it 
is only by close observation that you can discover 
for yourself the connection between the heads of 
yellow flowers which come up in early spring, and 
the groups of large angular woolly leaves which 
follow them in the same spots much later in the 
season. 



196 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

The life-history of the coltsfoot introduces us 
also to another conception which we must clearly 
understand if we wish to know anything about 
many plant biographies. I have said already that 
parts of one and the same coltsfoot plant might 
easily be mistaken for separate individuals; and, 
indeed, if the stem gets severed, particular groups 
of leaves may live on as such, in two or more dis- 
tinct portions. This leads us on to the considera- 
tion of a great group of plants like the common 
wild strawberry, in which a regular system of sub- 
division exists, and in which new plants are ha- 
bitually produced by offsets or runners, as well as 
by seedlings. Such a method of increase is to 
some extent a survival into higher types of the 
primitive mode of reproduction by subdivision. 

A strawberry plant grows in the first instance 
from a seed, which was embedded in a carpel or 
seed-like fruitlet on the ripe red swollen receptacle 
which we commonly call a strawberry. This seed 
germinates, and produces a seedling, which puts 
forth small green leaves, divided into three leaflets 
each at the end of a long and slender leaf-stalk. 
As it grows older, however, besides its own tufted 
perennial stem or stock, it sends out on every side 
long branches or runners, which are in fact hori- 
zontal or creeping stems in search of new root- 
ing places. These stems run along the ground 
for some inches, and then root afresh. At each 
such rooting-point, the plant sends up a fresh 
bunch of leaves, which gradually grows into a 
distinct colony, by the decay of the intermediate 
portion or runner. Again, this new plant itself 
in turn sends forth runners in every direction all 
round it ; so that often the ground is covered for 
yards by a network of strawberry plants, all ulti- 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 197 

mately derived from a single seedling. Theoret- 
ically, we must regard them all as severed parts 
of one and the same plant, accidentally divided 
from the main stem, since only the union of two 
different parents can give us a totally distinct in- 
dividual. But practically they are separate and 
independent plants, competing with one another 
thenceforth for food, soil, and sunshine. 

A great many plants are habitually propagated 
in such indirect ways, as well as by the normal 
method of flowering and seeding. Indeed, it is 
difficult to separate the two processes of mere 
growth, as shown in budding or branching, and 
reproduction by subdivision, as shown in the 
springing of saplings from the roots or stem, the 
production of runners, the division of bulbs, and 
the rooting of suckers. I will therefore give here 
a few select instances of these frequent incidents 
m the life-history of various species. 

The tiger-lilies of our gardens produce little 
dark buds, often called bulbils, in the angles of 
their foliage leaves. These buds at last fall off 
and root themselves in the soil, forming to all ap- 
pearance independent plants. Much the same 
thing happens with many English wild-flowers. 
For example, in the plant known as coral-root 
(allied to the cuckoo-flower) little bud-bulbs are 
formed in the angles of the leaves, which drop on 
the damp soil of the woods where the plant grows, 
and there develop into new individuals. In this 
last-named case the plant seldom sets its fruit at 
all, the reproduction being almost entirely carried 
on by means of the bulbils. Such instances sug- 
gest to us the pregnant idea that a seed is noth- 
ing more than a bud or young shoot, to whose 
making two separate parents have contributed. 



198 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

There is, in short, no essential difference between 
the two processes of growth and reproduction. 

Again, in the common lesser celandine the root- 
stock emits a large number of tiny pill-like tubers, 
which grow and lay by rich material underground 
(derived from the leaves) during the summer sea- 
son. In the succeeding spring, however, each of 
these tubers develops again into a separate plant, 
in a way with which the familiar instance of the 
potato has made us familiar. In the crocus, 
once more, and many other bulbous plants, sev- 
eral small bulbs are produced each year by the 
side of the large one, and these smaller bulbs are 
of course, strictly speaking, mere branches of the 
original crocus-stem. But they grow separate at 
last, by the decay or death of the central bulb, 
and themselves in turn produce at their side yet 
other bulbs, which become the centres of still 
newer families. We may parallel these cases with 
those of trees whose boughs bend down and root 
in the ground so as to become in time independ- 
ent individuals; or with runners like those of the 
strawberry and the creeping buttercup, which root 
and grow afresh into separate plantlets. 

Sometimes still more curious things happen to 
plants in the way of reproduction by subdivision. 
There is an English pondweed, for example, which 
grows in shallow pools liable to be frozen over in 
severe winters. As cold weather approaches, the 
top of the growing shoots in this particular pond- 
weed break off of themselves, much as leaves do 
at falling time. But they break off with all their 
living material still preserved within them undis- 
turbed; and they then sink and retire to the 
unfrozen depths of the pond, where they remain 
unhurt till spring comes round again. This is 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 1 99 

just what the frogs and newts and other animal in- 
habitants of the pond do at the same time to pre- 
vent getting frozen. Next year the severed tops 
send out roots in the soft mud of the bottom, and 
grow up afresh into new green pondweeds. 

It is therefore impossible to make any broad 
line of distinction in this way between what may 
be considered as modes of individual persistence 
in the self-same plants, and what may be regarded 
as modes of reproduction by subdivision. Some 
plants, like couch-grass and elm, are almost always 
surrounded by young shoots which may ultimate- 
ly become to all intents and purposes independent 
individuals; while others, like corn -poppy or 
Scotch fir, never produce any offsets or suckers. 
In the meadow orchids each plant produces 
every summer a second tuber by the side of the 
old one ; and from the top of this tuber the next 
year's stem arises in due time with its spike of 
flowers. Here we may fairly regard the tuber as 
a simple means of persistence in the plant itself ; 
there is nothing we could possibly call reproduc- 
tion. But in many lilies the older bulbs produce 
numerous small branch bulbs at their sides; and 
these younger bulbs may become practically in- 
dependent, each of them sending up in the course 
of time its own stem and its own spike of flowers. 

Even when the main trunk of a tree is dead, 
through sheer old age, it often happens, as in the 
elm and birch, that the roots send up fresh young 
shoots, which may grow again, and prolong the 
life of the plant indefinitely. In stone-crops and 
other succulent herbs, which grow in very dry and 
desert situations, the merest fragment of a stem, 
dropped on moist soil, will send out roots and 
grow afresh into a new individual. Cactuses and 



200 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

other desert plants have often to resist immense 
drought, and therefore possess extraordinary vital- 
ity in this way. They will grow again from the 
merest cut end under favourable conditions. 

These few short hints as to the life-history of 
various plants in different circumstances will serve 
to show you how vast is their variety. Every plant, 
indeed, has endless ways and tricks of its own; 
and every point in its structure, however unob- 
trusive, has some purpose to serve in its domestic 
economy. Thus the ivy-leaved toad-flax, which 
grows on dry walls, has straight flower-stalks, 
which become bent or curved when the flowering 
is over. Why is this ? Well, the plant has ac- 
quired the habit of bending round its flower-stalk 
after the blossoming season, because it cannot 
sow its seeds on the bare stone, so it hunts about 
diligently for a crevice among the mortar into 
which it proceeds to insert its capsule, so that 
the seedlings may start fair in a fit and proper 
place for their due germination. So, too. the 
subterranean clover, growing on close-cropped 
hillocks much nibbled over by sheep, where its 
pods of rich seeds would be certainly devoured 
if exposed on a long stalk like that of other 
clovers, has developed a few abortive corkscrew- 
like blossoms in the centre of its flower-head, by 
whose aid the whole group of pods burrows its 
way spirally into the soil beneath ; so that the 
plant thus at once escapes its herbivorous ene- 
mies, and sows its own seed for itself automat- 
ically. It would be impossible in our space to do 
more than thus briefly indicate by two or three 
examples the immense number and variety of 
these special adaptations. Every plant has hun- 
dreds of them. There is not a tiny hair on the 



SOME PLANT BIOGRAPHIES. 201 

surface of a flower, not a spot or a streak in the 
blade of a leaf, not a pit or depression on the skin 
of a seed, that has not its function. And close 
study of nature rewards us most of all for our 
trouble in this, that it reveals to us every day 
some delightful surprise, forces on our attention 
some hitherto unsuspected but romantic relation 
of structure and purpose. 

I will mention but one more case as a typical 
example. There exists as a rule a definite rela- 
tion between the shape and arrangement of the 
leaves in plants, and the shape and arrangement 
of the roots and rootlets, with regard to water- 
supply. Each plant, in point of fact, is like the 
roof of a house as respects the amount of rain 
which it catches and drains away ; and it is im- 
portant for each that it should utilise to the ut- 
most its own particular supply of drainage or rain 
water. Hence you will find that some plants, like 
the dock, have large channelled leaves, with a leaf- 
stalk traversed by a depression like a drainage 
runnel : plants of this type carry off all the water 
that falls upon them towards the centre, inwards. 
But such plants have always also a descending 
tap-root, which instantly catches and drinks up 
the water poured by the drainage system of the 
leaves towards the middle of the plant. In other 
plants, again, however, with round leaf-stalks and 
outward pointed leaves, the w T ater that falls upon 
the foliage drains outward towards the circum- 
ference ; and in all such plants the roots, instead 
of descending straight down, are spreading and 
diffused, so as to go outward towards the point 
where the water drips on them. Moreover, in 
this latter case it is found, on digging up the 
plant carefully, that the absorbent tips of the 



202 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

rootlets are clustered thickest about the exact 
spots where the leaves habitually drop the water 
down upon them. Every plant is thus to some 
extent a catchment-basin which utilises its own 
rainfall : it collects rain for itself, and conducts 
it by a definite system of pipes and channels to 
the precise spots in the soil where it can best be 
sucked up for the plant's own purposes. 

On the other hand, while every part of every 
plant is thus minutely arranged for the common 
advantage, every species of plant and animal 
fights only for its own hand against all comers. 
Nature is therefore one vast theatre of plot and 
counterplot. The parasites prey on the vegeta- 
tive kinds; the vegetative kinds respond in turn 
by developing checks to counteract the parasites. 
The squirrels produce sharper and ever sharper 
teeth to gnaw through the nutshells; the nut- 
trees retaliate by producing for their part thicker 
and ever thicker shells to baffle the squirrels. 
And this play and by-play goes on unceasingly 
from generation to generation; because only the 
cleverest squirrels can ever get enough nuts to 
live upon ; and only the hardest-shelled and 
bitterest-rinded nuts can escape the continual 
assaults of the squirrels. In order, therefore, 
really to understand the structure and life of any 
one species, we should have to know in the mi- 
nutest detail all about its native conditions, its 
soil, its surroundings, its allies, its hired friends, 
its blackmailing foes, its exterminating enemies. 
Such exhaustive knowledge of the tiniest weed is 
clearly impossible ; but even the little episodes 
we can pick out piecemeal are full of romance, of 
charm, and of novelty. 



THE PAST HISTORY OF PLANTS. 203 

CHAPTER XIV. 

THE PAST HISTORY OF PLANTS. 

I promised some time since to return in due 
season to the question why plants, as a rule, ex- 
hibit distinct kinds or species, instead of merging 
gradually one into another by imperceptible de- 
grees. This problem is generally known as the 
problem of the origin of species. You might per- 
haps expect (since plants have grown and de- 
veloped, as we have seen, one out of the other) 
that they would consist at present of an unbroken 
series, each melting into each, from the highest 
to the lowest. This, however, is not really the 
case; they form on the contrary groups of dis- 
tinct kinds : and the reason is, that natural selec- 
tion acts on the whole in the opposite direction. 
It tends to make plants group themselves into 
definite bodies or species, all alike within the body, 
and well marked off from all others outside it. 

Here is the way this arrangement comes 
about. As situations and circumstances vary, a 
form is at last arrived at in each situation which 
approximately fits the particular circumstances. 
This form may perhaps vary again in other situ- 
ations, and give rise to individuals better adapted 
to the second set of circumstances. But just in 
proportion as such individuals surpass in adap- 
tation one another will they live down the less 
adapted. Hence, the intermediate forms will 
tend to perish, and the world to be filled in the 
end with groups of plants, each distinct from 
others, and each relatively fixed and similar 
within its own limits. 



204 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

At all times, and in all places, this process of 
variation and adaptation is continually going on ; 
new kinds are being formed, and intermediate? 
are dying out between them. For the interme 
diates are necessarily less adapted than the older 
form to the old conditions, and than the newer 
form to the new ones. 

Moreover, when any great point of advantage 
is once gained by a kind, it tends to go on and be 
preserved, while variations in other parts con 
tinue uninterrupted. Thus, the first composite 
plant (to take a concrete example) gained by the 
massing of its flowers into a compact head : and 
it then became a starting-point for fresh develop- 
ments, each of which maintained the massed flow, 
er-head, with its ring of united stamens, while 
adding to the type some fresh point of its own, 
which specially adapted it to a particular situ- 
ation. So, too, the first peaflower gained by the 
peculiar form of its oddly-shaped corolla, and 
therefore became the ancestor of many separate 
kinds, each of which retains the general pea-like 
type of blossom, while differing in other respects 
as widely from its neighbours as gorse and clo- 
ver, peas and laburnum, broom and vetches, scar- 
let-runners and lupines. A group of kinds, so de 
rived from a common progenitor, but preserving 
throughout one or more of that progenitor's pe- 
culiarities, while differing much in other respects 
among themselves, is called a family. Thus we 
speak of the family of the peaflowers, the familv 
of the roses, the family of the lilies, the family of 
the orchids. Each family may include several 
minor groups, known as genera (in the singular, a 
genus) ; and each such genus may further include 
several distinct kinds or species. 



THE PAST HISTORY OF PLANTS. 205 

For example, all the peaflower/d7////y are dis- 
tinguished by their possession of a peculiar blos- 
som whose corolla consists of a standard, a keel, 
and two wings, like sweet-pea or broom. This 
family contains several genera, one of which is 
that of the clovers, including certain peaflowers 
which have learned to mass their blossoms into a 
roundish head, and have trefoil leaves, and very 
few seeds in the short seed-pod. The clovers, 
again, are subdivided into species or kinds, such 
as purple clover, Dutch clover, hop clover, and 
hare's-foot clover ; in Britain alone, we have 
twenty-one such distinct species or kinds of clo- 
ver. You will see at once that this method of 
grouping by ancestral forms enables us largely to 
reconstruct the history of each particular plant 
or animal. 

Why don't these kinds cross freely with one 
another, and so produce an endless set of puzzling 
hybrids ? Well, they do occasionally ; and such 
mongrel forms often show us every possible vari- 
ation between the two parents. But this can only 
happen when the parent stocks are very close to 
one another ; and even then, the hybrids tend to die 
out rapidly. Why ? Because each of the parents 
is better adapted to a particular situation ; the 
hybrid usually falls between two stools, and gets 
killed down accordingly. It cannot stand the 
competition of the true species. New kinds, how- 
ever, may sometimes take their rise from chance 
hybrids, which happen to possess some combina- 
tion of advantages. 

Thus plants in the mass, as we see them 
around us at the present day, are divisible into 
several well-marked groups, some of which are 



206 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

now dominant or leading orders, while others are 
hardly more than mere belated stragglers or loi- 
tering representatives of types once common, but 
now outstripped in the race by younger competi- 
tors. I cannot close without briefly describing to 
you the main divisions of such orders or groups, 
as now accepted by modern botanists. 

The widest distinction of all between plants 
is that which marks off the simpler and earlier 
forms, which are wholly composed of cells, from 
the higher and stem-forming types, which are 
also provided with systems of vessels and woody 
tissue. The first class is known as Cellular 
Plants; the second class as Vascular Plants. 
These are the greatest and most general divisions. 

The Cellular Plants comprise many sorts, 
from the simple one-celled types which float freely 
in water, up to the relatively high and complex 
seaweeds, which produce large fleshy fronds, and 
often display a considerable division of labour 
between their various parts and organs. Still, as 
most of them live in water, either fresh or salt, 
and wave freely about in the liquid that surrounds 
them, they have no need of an elaborate system 
of conducting vessels, because every part can 
drink in water and dissolved food-salts from the 
neighbouring pond, sea, or river. Still less have 
they any necessity for a woody stem, which would 
only be a disadvantage to them in stormy weather. 
Hence most of the cellular plants (with certain ex- 
ceptions to be noted hereafter) are water-weeds ; 
while most of the vascular plants (with other ex- 
ceptions to be similarly treated) are land plants. 
In particular trees and shrubs, the highest forms 
of plant life, are invariably terrestrial. 

Various successive stages of these cellular 



THE PAST HISTORY OF PLANTS. 207 

plants may be briefly described in rough outline. 
First of all we get the simple one-celled plant, the 
lowest type of all, consisting of a single mass 
of protoplasm, generally with chlorophyll, sur- 
rounded by a cell-wall. Next above these come 
the hair-like water-weeds, which consist of rows of 
such simple cells, placed end to end in single file, 
one in front of another, like pearls in a necklace. 
These kinds are many-celled, but each cell is here 
in contact with two others only, one below, and 
one above it. Thirdly, we get the flat leaf-like 
water-weeds, which have thin green fronds, com- 
posed of a single broad sheet of cells, not a hair- 
like row ; each cell has here many cells around it, 
but all lie in one plane; the sheet is only one cell 
thick ; it does not spread abroad in more than 
two directions. Lastly, we get the ordinary thick- 
fronded seaweed, in which sheets of cells, many 
layers deep, grow in divided masses on rope-like 
bases, and closely resemble to the eye true vas- 
cular plants with stems, leaves, and branches. 

Most of these cellular plants, when they pos- 
sess green chlorophyll, are known as algce. 

There are several low forms of plants, how- 
ever, which do not possess chlorophyll, but live 
at the expense of other plants, exactly as animals 
do. These are generally known in the lump as 
fungi. Many of them are terrestrial. The dis- 
tinction, however, is not a genealogical one. Cel- 
lular plants of various grades have often taken, 
time after time, to this lower parasitic or carrion- 
eating habit; and though they therefore resemble 
one another externally in their absence of green 
colour, in their usual whiteness and fleshiness, and 
in their mushroom-like substance, they do not 
really form a natural class ; their resemblance is 



208 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

due to their habits only. In short, we call any 
cellular plant a fungus, if instead of supporting 
itself by green cells, it has adopted the trick of 
living on organised material already laid up by 
other plants or animals. 

Among these fungus-like plants, again, some 
of the simplest and lowest are the celebrated bac- 
teria, which are one-celled organisms, living in 
stagnant or putrid fluids, and also in the bodies 
and blood of diseased animals. They answer 
among fungi to the one-celled alga. Many of 
them cause infectious diseases ; such are the bacilli 
of diphtheria, typhus, cholera, consumption, small- 
pox, and influenza. Surrounded by a suitable nu- 
tritious fluid, these tiny parasitic plants increase 
with extraordinary and fatal rapidity. Though 
they are really one-celled, and reproduce by cell- 
division, they often hang together in rude lumps 
or clusters which simulate to some extent the 
many-celled bodies. In this book, however, where 
we have concentrated our attention mainly on the 
true or green plants, I have not thought it well 
to dwell at any length on the habits or structure 
of these animal-like organisms. 

Another well-known group of small fungus- 
like plants is that which contains the yeast-fungus, 
a one-celled plant, which reproduces by budding. 

The higher fungi are many-celled, and often 
possess well-marked organs for different purposes. 
They answer rather to the seaweeds and higher 
alga. Familiar examples are the common moulds, 
which form on jam, dead fruit, and other decay- 
ing material. Some of them, like the smut of 
wheat and oats, are parasitic on growing plants, 
and most dangerous enemies to green vegetation. 
The highest fungi are the groups which include 



THE PAST HISTORY OF PLANTS. 209 

the mushroom, the puff-ball, and all those oth- 
er large and curiously-shaped forms commonly 
lumped together in popular language under the 
name of toadstools. Their anatomy and physiol- 
ogy is extremely complex. 

To recapitulate; Cellular Plants belong to 
two main types ; those which contain chlorophyll, 
and live like plants by eating and assimilating 
carbon under the influence of sunshine; these are 
generally grouped together in a rough class as 
alg^e : and those which contain no chlorophyll, but 
live, like animals, by using up or destroying the 
carbon-compounds already stored up by green 
plants; these are generally grouped together in 
a rough class as fungi. 

The lichens form a curious mixed group, whose 
strange habits cannot here be described at any 
adequate length ; they are not so much separate 
plants as united colonies of algae and fungi, in 
which the green alga does the main work of col- 
lecting food, while the parasitic fungus, increasing 
with it at the same rate, eats it up in part, while 
contributing in turn in various ways to the gen- 
eral good of the compound community. This is 
therefore hardly a case of pure destructive para- 
sitism, but rather one of a co-operative society 
banded together on purpose for mutual advan- 
tage. 

The mosses and liverworts, once more, show 
us an intermediate stage between the true cel- 
lular and the true vascular plants. They have 
a rudimentary stem, and beginnings of vessels. 
They have also leaves, or organs equivalent to 
them ; and they display the first approach to 
something like flowers. 
14 



2IO THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

The Vascular Plants, again, which are char- 
acterised by the possession of special vessels for 
the conveyance of sap and organised material, 
and by the presence of more or less woody fibres, 
are divisible into two main groups— -the flower- 
less, and the flowering. 

The flowerless group of Vascular Plants are 
mainly represented by the ferns and horsetails. 
These were at one time the leading vegetation of 
the entire world, far outnumbering in kinds all 
the rest put together. But they have now been 
lived down by the flowering plants, which at pres- 
ent compose the main mass of the plant aristoc- 
racy. 

The flowering plants, once more, fall into two 
main groups; the small but widespread group of 
naked-seeded plants, including the cycads, pines, 
firs, cypresses, and yews ; and the very large 
group of fruit-bearing plants, including almost all 
the kinds of herb, shrub, bush, or tree familiarly 
known to you, as well as almost all those various 
plants with which we have busied ourselves in this 
little volume. You will thus see that the vast 
majority of species in the vegetable kingdom be- 
long to small and relatively inconspicuous orders. 
Indeed, for the most part, we habitually disregard 
the cellular plants, thinking only of the vascular; 
while among the vascular themselves, again, we 
disregard the flowerless, thinking only of the 
flowering; and among the flowering kinds, we 
concentrate our attention as a rule on the fruit- 
producing group (in the botanical sense of the 
word) and neglect the naked-seeded. In short, 
we usually confine our attention to the highest 
division of the highest group of the highest half 
of the vegetable kingdom. The rest are for 



THE PAST HISTORY OF PLANTS. 21 1 

us mere inconspicuous mosses, moulds, or sea- 
weeds. 

The fruit-producing group of flowering plants 
are finally divided into the dicotyledons and the 
monocotyledons, whose chief differences I have al- 
ready pointed out to you. And to complete our 
picture of this infinite hierarchy, the dicotyledons, 
once more, are divided into various families, such 
as the buttercups, the roses, the crucifers, the 
composites, the labiates, the umbellates, the saxi- 
frages, and the catkin-bearers. The buttercup 
family, in particular (to select a single group), is 
further divisible into genera, such as buttercup, 
marsh-marigold, larkspur, anemone, clematis, and 
aconite; while the buttercup genus (to take one 
only among these) comprises in turn a vast num- 
ber of species, such as the water-crowfoot, the 
ivy-leaved crowfoot, the meadow buttercup, the 
bulbous buttercup, the lesser celandine, the goldi- 
locks, and so on for pages. Similarly, the mono- 
cotyledons are divided into various families, such 
as the orchids, lilies, grasses, and sedges : the 
families are divided into many genera; and each 
genus into several species. The infinite variety 
of circumstances is such that each type goes on 
varying and varying for ever in order to fit itself 
for the endless situations it is called upon to fill, 
and the endless diversity in the accidents of cli- 
mate or soil or position that it may chance to 
come across. Thus we have in England more 
than a hundred different kinds of grasses, each 
specially adapted for some one particular situa- 
tion. 

Only the closest individual study can give any 
adequate idea of this immense diversity of plants 
in nature. 



212 THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 

The geological history of the world shows us 
that the development of plants has been slow and 
progressive. In the earliest rocks (of which an 
account is given in another volume of this series), 
we get few traces of any plants but the lowest : so 
that at that time it is probable none but seaweeds 
and their like existed — cellular plants which con- 
tain hardiy any parts solid enough for preserva- 
tion. By the age when the coal was laid down, 
however, ferns, horsetails, and many gigantic ex- 
tinct plants with solid stems had begun to exist ; 
but few or no flowering plants, except conifers, 
had yet been developed. Later still came the true 
flowering plants, with covered seeds, at first in 
simple and antiquated forms, but becoming more 
complex as birds, mammals, and flying insects of 
the flower-haunting types were developed side by 
side with them to visit and fertilise them or to 
disperse their seeds. Succulent fruits, of course, 
could only arise when tribes of fruit-eaters had 
been evolved to assist them ; while such special 
bee-fertilised types as the sage group, and such 
complex forms as the orchids and composites, re- 
quiring the aid of highly-developed insects, are 
of extremely recent evolution. Plant and animal 
life have continually reacted upon one another. 

Whoever has been interested in the study of 
plants by this little book may be glad to know 
what is the best way of continuing his acquaint- 
ance with the subject in future. Nothing gives 
one such a grasp of the facts of botany and of 
life in general as careful study of the plants which 
grow in one's own country. Students in the 
British Isles should therefore buy a copy of 
Bentham and Hooker's British Flora, and seek by 
the aid of the key at its beginning to identify for 



THE PAST HISTORY OF PLANTS. 213 

themselves every flowering plant they come across 
in our woods and meadows. American students 
should get in like manner Asa Gray's Manual of 
Botany. In the course of identifying all the 
plants you find, you will begin to understand the 
nature of plant life and the course of plant evo- 
lution in a way that is quite impossible through 
any mere book-reading. Buy also a simple platy- 
scopic lens, and a sharp penknife to assist you in 
dissection. Armed with these simple but useful 
tools, you will soon make rapid and solid prog- 
ress in the knowledge of nature. 

For further and more detailed information on 
the laws of plant life, you cannot do better than 
consult Kerner and Oliver's Natural Histo?-y of 
Plants, which sets forth in full an immense num- 
ber of interesting and curious facts, in language 
comprehensible to any attentive and careful stu- 
dent. 



INDEX. 



Acacias, 50, 173. 

Aconite, winter, 93, 94. 

Adaptation, 204. 

Agave, Mexican, " Century 
Plant," 186. 

Air, food furnished by, 14, 34. 

Alder, 131. 

Algse, 207. 

Amaryllids, 113. 

Anemones, 71, 153. 

Angelica, 138. 

Animals, agency of, in seed dis- 
tribution, 12; necessity of 
plants to, 14. 

Annuals, 51, 176. 

Anthers, 80. 

Apple, 156, 179. 

Arrowhead, 108, 111. 

Artichoke, 144. 

Arum, common, 71, 120; white, 
. " calla lily," 123. 

Ash, proportion in wood, 3}. 

Ash, 150. 

Asparagus, 113. 

Asphodel, 113, 136. 

Aster, 145, 146. 

B. 

Bachelors' buttons, 93. 
Bacilli, 208. 
Bacteria, 208. 
Balsam, garden, 152. 
Bamboos, 133, 178. 
Banana, 157. 
Barberry, 156. 
Bark, 68, 176. 
Barley, 133. 
Bean, 97. 
Beech, 132, 187. 



Bees, colony system of, 77. 
Beets, 160. 
Begonias, 106. 
Birch, 132, 150. 
Birdsfoot-trefoil, 98. 
Birds, as an agent in the fer- 
tilisation of flowers, 102. 
Blackberry, 155. 
Bladderwort, 68. 
Bracts, 143. 
Branches, 161. 
Breadfruit, 157. 
Broom, 97, 173. 
Broomrape, 180. 
Budding, 51. 
Bulbs, 52. 
Burdock, 144. 

Burnet, great, 128; salad-, 126. 
Bur-reed, 129. 
Buttercup, 71, 89, 149. 



Cactus, 50, 183, 199. 

Calla lily, 123, 148. 

Calla, marsh-, 123. 

Calyx, 83, 128. 

Campion, red, 30, 31, 83; white, 

3i- 
Canterbury bell, 98. 
Carbonic acid, food of plants, 

14, 34, 59- 
Carnivorous plants, 63. 
Carpel, 70, 80, 94, in. 
Carrot, 138, 145. 
Catchflies, 65. 
Catkins, 130, 148. 
Celandine, lesser, 71, 93, 198. 
Celery, 138. 
Cells, plant, 26, 172. 
Cellular plants, 206. 



215 



2l6 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



Cellular tissue of plants, 43. 

Centaury, 144. 

" Century plant," 186. 

Cherry, 155. 

Chervil, 138. 

Chlorophyll, 19, 26, 35, 37, 50, 54, 

58, 180, 207. 
Chrysanthemum, 146. 
Cinerarias, 146. 
Cleavers, 158. 
Clematis, 153. 
Clover, 139. 
Coal, 16. 
Coconut, 183. 
Colony, plant compared to a, 

77- 
Colours in flowers, 11, 30, 80, 83, 

86, 88, 90, 94, 102, no, 124. 
Coltsfoot, 192. 
Columbine, 94, 95. 
Composites, 140, 204. 
Compound leaves, 44. 
Convolvulus, 83, 98. 
Coral root, 197. 
Coreopsis, 146. 
Cornflowers, 145. 
Corolla, 83; tubular, 98. 
Cotton, 154. 
Cotyledons, 161. 
Cow-parsnip, 138, 145. 
Cowslip, 137. 
Crocus, 71, 115, 198. 
Cross-fertilisation, 31, 84, 87, 91, 

106, 118, 135- 
Cucumber, 107, 157. 



Daffodil, 71, 114, 136. 
Dahlia, 139, 145, 146. 
Daisy, 139, 145. 
Dandelion, 139, 148, 152. 
Dicotyledons, 115, 161, 166, : 
Dissected leaves, 45. 
Division, reproduction by, 

74- 
Dodder, 180. 
Dog-rose, 96. 
Dogwood, 156. 
Draba verna, 184. 



Elderberry, 156. 

Elm, 150. 

Energy, plants as storers of, 16. 

Entire leaves, 45. 



Epiphytes, 181. 
Eucalyptus, 50. 
Euphorbia, 50. 
Evaporation, 16 
Evolution, 26. 



Families, 204. 

Ferns, 210. 

Fig, 158. 

P igwort, 102. 

Flowering-rush, no, in 

Flowers, 73, 85, 162. 

Forget-me-not, 137. 

Fox-glove, 101, 136, 137. 

Fritillary, 113. 

Fruit, 11, 149, 154. 

Fungi, 58, 207. 



Gardenia, 32. 

Genera, 204. 

Geological plants, 212. 

Geranium, scarlet, 104; wild, 96. 

Germination, 161. 

Gladiolus, 116. 

Gorse, 47, 71, 97, 98. 

Gourd, 157. 

Grape, 157. 

Grasses, 44, 130, 132, 160, 178. 

Groundsel, 135. 



IT. 



Harebell, 98, 113. 

Haw. 156. 

Hazel, 131. 

Head, 137. 

Heath, 98, 137. 

Hemlock, 138, 145. 

Hemp, 108. 

Herbaceous plants, 177. 

Herb-bennet, 158. 

Herb-Robert, 96. 

Heredity, 22, 32. 

Holly, 46, 156. 

Honey, n. 30, 00, 102. 

Honey-guides in flowers, 103, 

112. 
Honeysuckle, 156. 
Hops, 108. 
Hornbeam, 132. 
Houndstongue, 158. 
Humming-birds, 102. 
Hyacinth, 70, 71, 112, 136, 150. 
Hybrids, 205. 
Hydrogen, 15. 



INDEX. 



217 



I. 

Indian corn. 133, 177. 

Inrloration, 135. 

Insect-eating plants, 63. 

Insect fertilisation, 11. 30, 85, 86, 

87, 94, 102, 109, 116, 119, 122, 

125, 136. 
Insects, choice of honey, 90. 
Involucre, 143. 
Iris, 115, 116, 150. 



Jasmine, 32. 
Jonquils, 71. 

Laburnum, 97, 178. 

Land-plants, origin of, 29. 

Larkspur, 94, 95, 150. 

Laurel, common, 30. 

Leaves, 53, 78, 162, 201 ; func- 
tions of the, 33; shapes of, 
37; origin of, 48; structure of, 
169; falling of, 51. 

Lemon, 157. 

Lichens, 209. 

Lilac, 136. 

Lilies, 44, in, 136. 

Lilium auratum, 112, 136. 

Lily-of-the-valley, 113, 137. 

Lime, 150. 

Lines in flowers, 103. 

Liverworts, 209. 

Lobed leaves, 45. 

Lupine, 97, 98. 

M. 

Magnolia, 136. 

Mallow, 96, 135. 

Mango, 157. 

Manures, 61. 

Maples, 150. 

Marriage of plants, 10, 73. 

Marsh-marigold, 71, 93- x 50- 

Medlar, 156. 

Melons, 107, 157. 

Millet, 133. 

Mistletoe, 108, 156, 180. 

Monkey-plants, 101. 

Monkshood, 94, 96. 

Monocotyledons, 115,161, 166, 211. 

Mosses, 209. 

Mountain-ash, 179. 

Mulberry, 157. 

N. 
Narcissus, 114. 
Nasturtium, 40, 103. 



" Natural selection," 27, 32. 
Nectarine, 156. 
Nepenthes, 67. 
Nettle, 128. 

Night-flowering plants, 31. 
Nitrogen, how plants obtain, 57, 

61, 63, 72. 
Nuts, 158, 160, 202. 

O. 

Oak, 132. 

Odours in flowers, 31. 

Lid man's beard, 153. 

Onion, 113. 

Orange, 157. 

Orchids, 104, 116, 180, 183. 

Origin of plants, 14, 26. 

Ovaries, inferior, 113; develop- 
ment of the, 94, 96, in; com- 
pound, hi. 

Ovule, the, 10, 23, 76, 80, 82, 86. 

Oxygen, 15, 59. 

P. 

Palmate leaves, 41. 

Parallel veined leaves, 114, 144. 

Parasitic plants, 180, 202, 208. 

Peach, 155. 

Peaflowers, 97, 150, 160, 178, 204. 

Pear, 156, 179. 

Perennials, 51, 165. 

Perianth, no. 

Petals, 83, 88. 

Phosphorus, how plants obtain, 

57, 61. 
Pine-apple, 157. 
Pinnate leaves, 41. 
Pistil, the, 10, 76, 86. 
Pitcher plants, 66. 
Plum, 155. 

Pollen, 10, 23, 76, 81, 86. 
Pollen-masses of orchids, 117. 
Pollination, reproduction by, 10, 

23- 
Pomegranate, 157. 
Poppy, 28, 96, 150, 151, 160, 177. 
Potash, 61. 
Potato, 70, 160. 
Primrose, 99. 
Protoplasm, 57, 75. 
Pumpkin, 107, 157. 

R. 

Ranunculus, turban, 93. 
Raspberry, 155. 
Reproduction, 21, 73. 



2l8 



THE STORY OF THE PLANTS. 



Ribs, of leaves, 40. 
Rice, 133. 

" Robin Hood," 30, 
Root-pressure, 168. 
Roots, 54, 72, 101. 
Rose family, 156. 
Rose-hip, 156. 
Roses, i/3. 

Rotation of crops, 62. 
Runners, 62, 196. 



Sage, 101. 

Salad-burnet, 126. 

Salvias, 101 ; scarlet, 149. 

Samphire, 138. 

Sand-box tree, 152. 

Sap, 169, 175. 

Scabious, 137, 139, 142. 

Seaweed, 207. 

Seeds, dispersion of. 12, 149. 

Self-fertilisation, 85, 135. 

Sepals, 83. 

" Setting " melons. 107. 

Sex in plants. 73, 105. 

Shaddock, 157. 

Shepherd's purse, 135. 

Side-saddle plant, 66. 

Smuts, 208. 

Snap-dragon, 101. 

Snowdrop, 71, 113. 

Snowflake, summer. 

Soil, food furnished 

59- 
Solomon's seal, 113, 
Spathe, 120, 148. 
Species, origin, 203, 205. 
Squill, 113. 

Stamens, 10, 76, 79, 80, 86, 125. 
Stapelia, 102. 

Star-of-Bethlehem, 113, 136. 
Stems, 161. 
Stephanotis, 32. 
Stigma, 81. 
Stomata, 171, 193. 
Strawberry, 155, 196. 
" Struggle for Existence," 27. 
Style, the, 82. 
Suckers, 62. 

Sulphur, how plants obtain, 57. 
Sun, source of energy. 16. 
Sundew, 63. 

Sunflower, 139, 145, 146, 147. 
Sweet-pea, 97. 
Sweet-william, 137. 



114. 

by the, 



137. 



34- 



T. 

Teasel, 65. 
Thistle, 143. 
Thistledown, 152. 
Thorns, 46. 

liger lily, 104, 112, 197. 
Toad-flax, ivy-leaved, 200. 
Toothed leaves, 45. 
Toothwort, 180. 
i'ropieolum, 40. 
Tuberose, 32. 113. 136. 
Tubular corolla, 98. 
Tulip, 70, no, 113, 136. 
Turk's-cap lily, 112. 
Turnips, 160. 



U. 



204. 



Umbel, 137, 145. 



V. 

" Variation," 28, 32, 47, 
Vascular plants, 206. 210. 
Vascular tissue, 40, 49. 
Veins of leaves, 41. 
Venus's fly-trap, 63. 
Vetch, 97, 190. 
Vines, 179. 
Violet, 104. 

W. 

Water-crowfoot, 39, Q3, : 
Water, food furnished 

34- 
Water-lily, 88, 136. 173. 
Water plant, earliest, 22, 26. 
Water-plantain. 109, in. 
Wheat, 133. 
Whitlow-grass. 184. 
Whortleberry, 156. 
Willows, 132. 
Wind, as seed carrier, 12 

150. 
Wind-fertilisation, n, 30, 124. 
Wood, 165, 166. 



73- 

bv, 



62, 



Yarns, 160. 



Zinnia, 146. 



Z. 



THE END. 



(1) 



NOV 21 1§02 



